The “not-about-abortion” abortion bill

Judging by the enthusiasm it was met with last week from the MSM, MP Rod Bruinooge’s private member’s bill against “coerced abortion” is almost certainly dead in the water.  Recall the Unborn Victims bill which was initially greeted with optimism by many until it became apparent that it was a backdoor attack on abortion rights.  It’s a bad sign when the media starts mocking a bill right out of the gate:

Let me make sure I have this right; Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge is chair of the House pro-life caucus. Despite this fact, he really, really doesn’t want to reopen the abortion debate in Canada. Please believe him – he doesn’t want to discuss abortion in any way. Not sure what they discuss at their pro-life caucus meetings but no matter.

Bruinooge himself almost certainly knows the bill is unpassable — he no sooner tabled it than he admitted it would present an enforcement challenge:

Mr. Bruinooge, who leads Parliament’s “pro-life caucus,” agreed that so called “he said she said” scenarios would be difficult to deal with but not impossible.

Just what the doctor ordered:  another intrusive, redundant, administrative nightmare of a law that would be next to impossible to enforce, terrorize doctors and allow anti-choicers to waste the courts’ time with gibberish law suits.

Clearly it’s little more than an election year dog whistle meant to raise an urgent little hardon in the disgruntled, sex-obsessed socon vote.   Bruinooge might have even had Harper’s secret blessing on this thing — with the caveat that it be so unpassable that it wouldn’t survive its second reading.  But the message about the abortion bill that’s not really about abortion except that it is has been sent.  And received.

UPDATE: From the comments with a thread on this topic at BigCityLib, Buckets nails what could be behind the bizarre theory that “coerced abortion” is such a big problem as to require punitive legislation:

buckets said…

There are several interesting contrasts here. First, it’s interesting that roughly the same people who demand that there be no limits (or almost none) on speech seem to want to regulate private arguments about reproduction.

Also, it is (roughly) the same people too who are willing themselves to resort to coercive speech to dissuade women from having abortions. Indeed, I wonder here whether we don’t have an interesting example of transference — because their own ideology invites them to coerce women out of abortions, they imagine that their opposites must be true.