A lot of negative attention has been directed against Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth for using colourful language in rebuking women’s groups concerned about the Tory decision not to fund abortion in women’s reproductive health programs for developing countries. The real profanity is the threat amounting to extortion not to fund women’s groups who dare speak out against this deceptive policy.
Funding for many of these groups has been subsequently terminated. The Harper government is in tune with antediluvians of the U.S. south who are working against this basic women’s right and whose policies in Oklahoma were ditched recently as too draconian even there.
The rights of women over their own bodies should be as sacrosanct as the rights of men over their bodies, but convoluted logic and misrepresentation obscures this obvious fact. In National Post letters doctors have claimed absurdly that legalized abortion has not prevented deaths of women. In support of Harper’s wet-nursing his fundamentalist base, Jonathan Kay claims that deaths from unsafe abortion in developing countries only amount to 3 per cent of the total pregnancy-related deaths, the remaining 97 per cent being attributable to antepartum and postpartum hemorrhages, sepsis and conditions such as high blood pressure. This way Kay sidelines the fact that these deaths are part of the package, that these conditions come with the territory and cannot be addressed with a handout or two but are the result of extreme poverty, unsanitary conditions, poor nutrition and multiple pregnancies, sometimes more than one a year. The only solution to unviable pregnancies under such conditions like these and circumstances such as rape as a weapon of war and patriarchal marital-rape is contraceptive prevention or early abortion.
Last week the ethicist Margaret Somerville weighed in with an Edmonton Journal article in which, borrowing from the building trades, she promotes mystification and over-simplification by suggesting the choices between the “development model of the fetus — which is a continual presence,” as opposed to the “constructed model, which the woman maker has the option of terminating at some point.” She would eliminate that option. While claiming to be free of “ideology,” unlike the pro-choice advocates, she asks that the world be other than it is, and in the meantime, that women pay the price.
The reason for the G8 initiative is that women do pay with their health and lives: every eight minutes a woman dies from a non-therapeutic abortion or from the results of pregnancy that shouldn’t have been.
In her apologia for the position that “abortion entails … the breach of the value of respect for all human life, in general,” Somerville and those in her camp show callous disregard for the lives of millions of suffering and dying women, and an impoverished idea of what dignity for women in general entails.
Doris Wrench Eisler, St. Albert
