Other than the Usual Suspects, it looks like Rod Bruinooge’s “coerced abortion” bill isn’t getting much traction. The prevailing opinion seems to be that this is at best weird and unnecessary, and a pretty transparent attempt to curtail abortion rights. Surprisingly, people seem to have caught the play pretty quickly:
While abortion is something Bruinooge has no interest in discussing, he does think there is a big problem in Canada of women being coerced into having abortions against their will.
This of course has nothing to do with abortion per se but rather women being threatened to have abortions against their will something we can all agree is wrong. It is equally wrong for women to have their tonsils out against their will but that private members bill will have to wait for another day.
Heh. And it is equally wrong for women to be forced to bear children against their will, but I don’t see any private members’ bills about that being tabled anytime soon either.
So to summarize, the chair of the pro-life caucus doesn’t want to talk about abortion but does think there’s a menace of women being coerced into having abortions against their will. This is both a questionable assertion (that there are many women being coerced into having abortions – I’m not saying it isn’t an issue, it just strikes me as one of those solutions seeking a problem) and one that is almost certainly already covered under the criminal code.
Exactly. As I pointed out a few days ago, coercion, bullying, intimidation and threats — for any reason — are already against the law. There’s no legitimate rationale for amending the existing law to address so rare a circumstance as “coerced abortion”, especially within the hazy parameters defined by Bill C-510 (“Withdrawal of financial resources or a place to live”? Just imagine everyone who could get swept up in that little scenario.).
As much as Bruinooge and his fellow travellers might get off on the fantasy that “coerced” abortion is such a rampant occurance as to require its own specific legislation, reality just doesn’t bear it out. And that’s something I’m pretty sure Bruinooge and everyone else who supports this bill knows full well.
But, we will keep our eye on it.
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unrepentant old hippie 
I wish these people could channel their energy into something meaningful, like doing something about the poverty rate of children already born, in this country.
But they won’t.
I’ve often voiced that wish as well. It’s sad to see so much righteous energy go to waste. And yet it’s possible to be philosophically against abortion, and still channel energy in actions that are truly positive ones. But these people generally eschew actions they deem “politically correct”, as if their renegade image depended on explicitly supporting wonky bills and tacitly supporting the violent margins of the movement.
It’s not abortion anymore, it’s about coercion, and nobody knows better how to do that than those who wish to deceive for their own gain.
No matter how we couch this argument, the real victims are the untold women who apparently to this day have no say in what the fuck happens to them, and their bodies, their very existence.
We waste so much time arguing about the validity of real people, that our creepy society allows us to believe some are worth less than others. And this thing with women just never seems to end. How much proof do people need?
No worthwhile purpose in humanity can ever come from making some of us worth less than others.
Good morrow, all!
Bruce: Absolutely! Men who seek to control women do so out of fear. Men who fear women have one shag of a lot of growing up to do. Men who have that much growing up to do seek public office mostly because they are more or less unsuitable for any productive means of earning a living. So we wind up with political leaders still smarting from being caught doing whatever aroused Mummy’s disapproval.
The worst of it is…we elect these cases of arrested development, and have to trust their judgment on our behalf.
Yeah, we get what we deserve, eh?