OTTAWA, Oct. 3, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Canada’s pro-abortion activists and Opposition parties are lining up against a new motion put forward by a Tory MP to condemn sex-selective abortions, which evidence has shown to be a grave concern in certain sections of the country.
Many would think it uncontroversial for a Western democracy to condemn the targeted killing of girls. Then again, you’d think it would be easy to ban abortion coercion too.
But Canada’s Parliament defeated a bill seeking just such a ban in 2010. And as it turns out, Canada’s pro-aborts have responded to Mark Warawa’s Motion 408, tabled Sept. 26th, by arguing that concerns about sex selection shouldn’t get in the way of the greater need for “absolute” access to abortion.
“I don’t think [sex-selective abortion] is okay, but I also don’t think the state has a right intervening in this issue,” Liberal health critic Hedy Fry told the Globe and Mail. “It is a medical decision between the physician and the patient. It should be left there as all abortions should be.”
Niki Ashton, the women’s critic for the New Democratic Party, which forms Canada’s Official Opposition, dismissed Motion 408 as “a rehashed attempt to reopen the abortion debate.”
The fact is that no matter how much the abortion movement might “dislike” the idea that girls are being targeted, they embrace sex selection as a reason for abortion just as much as economics or disability.
On Tuesday, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada linked to a blog post by educator and activist Jane Cawthorne laying out why abortion advocates refuse to “condemn” sex selection.
Claiming that pro-life advocates raise the issue because they believe it is the “feminist Achilles heel,” Cawthorne insists that there is “no feminist dilemma” over it: “Our bottom line has to be to let the woman decide. Always.”
“The whole line of thinking that some abortions are done for reasons that are more valid than others, because someone was raped, for example, is problematic,” writes Cawthorne. “Any woman can choose an abortion for any reason, and she doesn’t have to tell us what it is. It’s none of our business.”
The logic here is impeccable if we accept the premise that a woman has a “right to choose.” Who are we to judge her choices?
Conversely, if we accept the premise that the unborn child is a human being, then abortion is always egregious, always murder. If the unborn are human beings, then of course we condemn sex selection and ban it along with all abortions. But if the unborn are not human beings, then why would it matter to us?
Those who are inclined to accept the “right to choose” should know where it will lead them: Cawthorne’s unyielding defense of “choice” forces her, as a self-proclaimed feminist, to conclude that protecting girls in the womb from being targeted over their gender is “as coercive as demanding [the woman] abort the girl” and is ultimately requires us “to sacrifice [the woman’s] will for ideology.”
But if we believe at all in the sanctity of unborn life, then we’ll recognize the argument as a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. Because in the end what we’ve got here are so-called “women’s rights” activists sacrificing girls on the altar of radical feminist ideology.
Patrick Craine is the Canadian Bureau Chief for LifeSiteNews.com and president of Campaign Life Coalition Nova Scotia.