YELLOWKNIFE, NWT, August 30, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Canada’s largest physicians’ association, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) has elected an openly lesbian doctor as the new president of the 76,000-member organization.
Dr Anna Reid, who practices as an emergency room doctor at the Stanton Territorial Hospital in Yellowknife, was officially introduced as the new president of the CMA at the organization’s national convention held in the capital of the Northwest Territories earlier this month. She will serve as president for one year.
The new president’s biography posted on the CMA website notes that she lives “with her partner, Linda, and their canine life–coach, Ella.”
In an interview with Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, Reid, who is the CMA’s first president from the Northwest Territories, the first open homosexual, and the sixth woman to head the doctor’s group, said, “Being a woman has never stood in the way of my doing anything – and neither has being lesbian.”
In her inaugural address to the General Council delivered in Yellowknife, Reid said doctors must “rise above fear” and that eliminating all forms of inequity should be one of the physicians’ main goals.
The CMA’s position on life issues shows that the group has no “fear” when denying the fundamental equality of the right to life of the pre-born.
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In 2008, the CMA lashed out at a proposed Unborn Victims of Crime bill (Bill C-484), saying the legislation, proposed by Edmonton-Sherwood Park MP Ken Epp, would limit women’s “access to abortion.”
While then-president Dr. Robert Ouellet protested that the CMA’s disapproval of the bill was “not about abortion…it’s being against making doctors criminals,” the CMA’s official statement said the vote was indeed “about abortion.”
The statement said the group was concerned “at the prospect of criminalizing a medical act…The Bill C-484, in its current form, constitutes a significant step towards subjecting those who perform abortions to criminal sanctions.”
At the same Yellowknife convention where the CMA announced the election of a homosexual president, the group voted to support the wording of Canada’s Criminal Code, which states that a baby becomes a “human being” only after being completely born.
According to the CMA report on the convention, they voted to pass “a resolution supporting the current wording of the Criminal Code which states that a child ‘becomes a human being within the meaning of this Act when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother.’ “
The move was seen by critics as a ploy to derail Conservative Member of Parliament Steve Woodworth’s motion M312 in the House of Commons to establish a special committee to consider when human life begins, which the CMA called a “backdoor” attempt to reopen the abortion debate.
Dr. Will Johnston, president of Canadian Physicians for Life, condemned the CMA’s move, saying that “every Canadian doctor knows that the unborn child is a live human being.”
He pointed out the hypocrisy of the Canadian Medical Association, which has a long-established policy of supporting abortion yet frets over children not exercising enough or not wearing bicycle helmets.
Stephanie Gray, co-founder and executive director of the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform, echoed Dr Johnston, observing, “In a contradiction of great proportion, the Canadian Medical Association has passed a motion to “foster a public debate” on end-of-life care, yet they are closed to debating when the very lives some doctors may end first began.”