White people mourning Romney defeat

The party of the War on Women and the war against access to abortion has gone down to a well deserved defeat in spite of all the lies and dirty tricks it could muster.



From the Christian Science Monitor

Republican hearings on birth control coverage

Now, it's been law in the U.S. since 2000 that in insurance plans that cover prescriptions, birth control prescriptions must be included. It's a ruling of their Human Rights Commission. However, an attempt by President Barack Obama to ensure that employers follow the law even if they are wholly or partially owned by religious organizations has been met with howls of outrage and cries of "What about their religious freedom?" Never mind that corporations don't have freedom of conscience, people do. It has become a rallying point for the U.S. Republicans. Interestingly, their committee to consider the matter is all male, and so are all the witnesses they called to testify on the matter: GOP Response to Obama/Contraceptive issue? An all-male congressional hearing. It's amazing how clueless they are.

Liberals fear nomination of single-issue candidate

Are anti-abortion partisans trying to 'hi-jack' Liberal nomination in Toronto? Members of the Canadian Liberal party are concerned that anti-choice Liberals are pushing an anti-choice candidate in a Federal by-election in the riding of Toronto-Danforth.

Liberals fear that pro-lifers are trying to take over weakened party. Trifon Haitas denies that he's a single-issue candidate, stating that abortion is only one of his concerns.

Vote New Democratic Party!

Republicans against contraception

Republican politicians in the U.S. are moving to deny birth control to women who receive medicare, to protect the delicate consciences of those who might choose not to use it. See Balloon Juice: "Religious liberty expands to include all employers and all women and all contraceptive coverage."

For years, liberals have been claiming that conservatives were ultimately targeting birth control, and conservatives always denied it. Marco Rubio has now all but announced that they are, in fact, targeting birth control.

U.S. government official calls for public hanging of obstetricians and gynecologists

Oh, and he regrets hitting Reply All when he meant for his sentiment to go to a select few! From The Well-timed Period: Larry Pittman, U.S. Representative, calls for the execution of U.S. citizens engaged in legal activities.

Remember the good old days when politicians merely drafted legislation to make it legal to assassinate Ob/Gyns, and when even the domestic terrorists at Operation Rescue were trying to distance themselves from people who assassinate Ob/Gyns?

Well, I'm happy to report we've come a long way, baby! We now have government officials calling for the public hanging of Ob/Gyns.

When the anti-choice get a clue: "I was a pro-life Republican"

This is refreshing. The author explains how she was anti-choice until she fell in love and realized that wanting sex doesn't make you a slut. "I was a pro-life Republican--until I fell in love" tells the story in her own words.

After all, I was 16, 17, 18. I knew everything. And what I knew more than anything else was that anyone who got herself into the position of having an unwanted pregnancy was filthy in body and soul. And again, since I would absolutely never have premarital sex, I would absolutely never make the decision to murder my child. Because I was pure, and so were babies, and together, me and the babies and my perfect hymen, we were all going to be fine if we could just fight the ignorant sluts. So that’s what I did. I talked and argued and cajoled and pontificated. I ministered to the heathen nerdgirl sluts in Telnet chats and online bulletin boards. I stood up for what I believed in, which was: If you do not believe like me, you deserve whatever brand of God’s wrath comes your way.

Read the rest.

Block Québecois accuses Harper of hidden agenda on abortion

BQ leader Gilles Duceppe said that a Conservative majority government would have a hidden agenda to re-criminalize abortion in Canada.

To support his argument, Duceppe referred to bill C-484, the unborn victims of crime act, a private member's bill presented by Alberta MP Ken Epp.

The bill would make it a crime to kill or injure a fetus.

Epp denies that C-484 would make a fetus a person, as pro-choice groups claim, arguing the bill opens the door to a challenge of legal abortions in Canada.

The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada points out that under a Texas law similar to C-484, teenager Gerardo Flores was found guilty on two counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison for helping his girlfriend end her five-month pregnancy of twins.

Morgentaler wins right to go ahead in lawsuit in New Brunswick

The New Brunswick Court of Queen's Bench has decided to allow Dr. Henry Morgentaler to proceed with a lawsuit against the government over its long-standing refusal to fund abortions at his clinic. The NB government is considering whether to appeal the ruling.

Judge Paulette Garnett said Morgentaler, an Order of Canada recipient, should have legal standing to proceed with the lawsuit because the personal nature of abortions - and the fact the procedures are time-sensitive - make it difficult for women to take the government before the courts, said a justice official on background.

The province had argued Morgentaler could not have standing because only a woman who needed to use the clinic had the right to challenge abortion policy.

Federal Conservatives drop effort to get New Brunswick to comply with Canada Health Act

New Brunswick continues to to restrict abortion to hospitals with multi-doctor approvals, even though they are in contravention of the Canada Health Act.

Heel! Alliance Party MPs on a leash

Does Alliance really believe that youth crime, immigration and abortion are issues that can be settled definitively by referendum? Suppose pro-life groups lose; would they stop opposing a woman's right to choose? I don't think so. This arrangement gives the idea of a neverendum referendum new meaning. And this policy, contrary to its claims, seems designed to give some special-interest groups extraordinary power. If a group opposed to a law or in favour of a policy can attract 400,000 signatures, a referendum must be held. It is not advice to Parliament; it is an automatic requirement. Talk about a capacity to set the national agenda. For special interests, that's leverage beyond their wildest dreams.
— David Cameron, Globe and Mail, November 10, 2000

Tags: abortion , Canadian politics

Stock's woman problem

Margaret Wente writes:

Back at Westmount High, Stockwell Day was the life of the party and the king of the prom. He never had a problem getting girls. Would those same girls vote for him today? Not a chance.

"I'd rather drink battery acid," said the other woman at my table at the big Canadian Alliance dinner in Toronto. (It was a Bay Street crowd, and the ratio of women to men was around 1 to 5.) Multiply that comment by a hundred, and you'll get a representative sampling of opinion on Mr. Day among the women I'm acquainted with.

To get ahead, Stockwell Day has to win over at least a few women among the vast middle class of urban and suburban baby boomers. But in Ontario, their dislike for him is visceral, bordering on irrational. No matter that they're completely fed up with Jean Chrétien. Even the hard-line tax conservatives can't bring themselves to vote Alliance. Nearly all the women I know are convinced that, no matter what he says, Mr. Day's Agenda of Respect includes a hidden agenda to roll back the right to choose. And they are not going to let him get away with it.

The abortion issue is a total loser everywhere east of the Bible belt, and Mr. Day, no dummy, knows it. It's no accident that the A-word has been scrubbed right out of the official platform. The A-word does not appear once in the 24 pages of campaign bumf that we were served up along with the beef Wellington. Nor did it rate a mention in Mr. Day's remarkably bland dinner speech, which was filled with sunny words such as "hope" and "families." And nowhere does it appear on the Alliance Web site.

And so, when the A-word popped up this week by surprise, it confirmed those women's worst fears that Mr. Day is dissembling through his teeth.

As The Globe discovered, the briefing books sent to Alliance candidates say the party would hold referendums on contentious social issues such as abortion or capital punishment if 3 per cent of voters signed a petition. Aha! The opposition jumped, and hammered hard. Joe Clark said now we know what the hidden agenda is. Mr. Chrétien, the first to raise the A-word in this campaign, was able to say he told us so.

How scary is this?

Well, the petition part is easy, as Campaign Life president Jim Hughes told me. "In 1985, we presented a petition to the Mulroney government with over a million signatures." But so what? As Mr. Hughes himself says, this isn't California. There's no law that says referendums are binding. No House and Senate would vote to repeal abortion rights, and if they ever did, no such law could be enacted without repealing the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Mr. Day knows all that, too. But try explaining it in a media scrum. The A-word is such a firecracker that it shuts down all rational conversation. So Stock got sandbagged on both sides. By claiming that abortion is the very, very furthest thing from his mind these days, he's denied his core supporters. "I don't know how he thinks he got elected as leader," says Jim Hughes. "He wouldn't even be there if it weren't for the grassroots, pro-life, pro-family Canadians that voted for him."

Annoy your friends and scare the folks whose trust you need to win. Then get mad at the media. Not a formula for electoral success.

Is Stock sincere when he says he wouldn't impose his own moral beliefs on the rest of us? I have no doubt about it. I believe he would gladly never speak the A-word again if it meant the baby-boomer women of Ontario would let him sign their dance card. He is not a single-issue candidate. Trouble is, that single issue, for women, is a deal-breaker.

Many politicians' public positions on abortion are more a matter of expediency than principle. In the United States, even liberals such as Hillary Clinton are obliged to say they're personally against it even though they defend choice. Even Mr. Chrétien was anti-choice once upon a time, before it became a political liability.

The trouble with Stock is that he believes it, and that this belief has been central to his life. In 1988, Valorie Day founded a pro-life pregnancy counselling clinic in Red Deer, and Stock helped raise money for it. (This week, the television show W-Five used a hidden camera to show how the clinic uses scare tactics on vulnerable young women, though Mr. Day says they didn't do that back then.) That same year, when he was a lowly MLA, he spoke more graphically about abortion than he has ever since—in public, at any rate. He said he thought that greater access to abortion would probably lead to a rise in child abuse. "The thinking is, if you can cut a child to pieces or burn them alive with salt solution while they're still in the womb, what's wrong with knocking them around a little when they're outside the womb?"

The women Mr. Day needs to win over will never forgive, and they'll never forget.

—MARGARET WENTE, Thursday, November 9, 2000

Tags: abortion , Canadian politics

Is this a guy with something to hide?

Now Stockwell Day wants to consult Canadians on the matter [percent of population needed to hold referendum], which suggests the delicious possibility of a referendum on what the threshold should be for a referendum. It invites the question of whether he needs a few more years to figure this stuff out. Does he really think a yes or a no vote is the best way to resolve such complex ethical issues as euthaniasia or late-term abortion? Moreover, is he serious that "governments would be forced to act" through these votes? What happens, say, to minority rights?

Then there's the issue of who gets to frame the question. Environics Research has posed two different abortion questions in recent years, both fair and legitimate, but with a 12-point spread in the results. As any student of Quebec politics knows, there is great art to writing a referendum question... On abortion and a citizen-initiated referendum, Mr. Day, in trashing his own documents, again fails the sniff test. And then gets shirty with the media for probing his contradictions. Inexplicably, he's creating the impression of a guy with something to hide.
—Edward Greenspon, Globe and Mail, November 9, 2000

Tags: abortion , Canadian politics

Alliance Party's abortion stumble has sinister overtones

The more lasting and possibly sinister impression left by Allinace's contradictory position is that the party has a platform to campaign on and has an agenda to govern with - and that they're not the same thing. Day fought to have abortion removed from medicare coverage when he was in the Alberta government. Has he changed his mind on an issue of basic principle (abortion), on a platform issue of governance (referendums), or is he simply diluting his position to make it more palatable to voters?...In California, where referendums are disguised as electoral "propositions," the results have often been to the advantage of the comfortable and organized, at the expense of the poor and the disenfranchised.
—Robert Howard, Hamilton Spectator, November 8, 2000

Tags: abortion , Canadian politics

Alliance Party mixes signals on abortion

Alliance strategist, Rick Anderson - "So we might have a referendum on abortion. Big deal." Alliance strategist, Rod Love said that as prime minister Day would not campaign on a referendum question. [unlike Chretien, who did campaign for the no side in the Quebec referendum. CR]

—Les Whittington, Tim Harper, Hamilton Spectator, November 8, 2000

Tags: abortion , Canadian politics

Pro-choice Dinner

CHOICE IS A GOOD THING

It's been eight years since the Canadian Supreme Court overturned the abortion law. To celebrate this landmark in the women's rights struggle, the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League (CARAL) will be hosting a Friends Of Choice dinner Monday (Jan. 29) at the Chinatown International Restaurant, 421 Dundas St. W. Tickets are $50 and reservations are required. For more childless info, please call 961- 1507.

P.S. the restaurant was packed full of cheerful celebrants. On the sidewalk outside, two or three scruffy protesters looked almost as marginal as street people.

Tags: abortion access, abortion