Well, that happened (Part Duh)

Motion 312 (aka Woodworth’s Wank, aka The Men Who Stare At Zygotes Motion) finally got its much-anticipated 2nd (and thankfully, last) hour of debate yesterday.

I had hoped to be all over it in Real Time, but as luck would have it I was waylaid by Real Life and away from my computer most of the day — in retrospect probably fortunate from a blood pressure point of view.  Through the miracle of modern cell phone technology I was able to keep track of the frenzied online response to the debate, but my participation was limited because I was preoccupied and I really hate typing on my phone, and frankly, after weeks of following this thing, I needed a break.  There’s a limit to how much idiocy one can endure, and the tsunami of stupid from Motion 312 supporters far exceeds it.

The debate itself started about 10:30am (Pacific), but the Twitterstorm raged all day and well into the wee hours of last night.  “#M312” quickly became the 2nd-highest-ranking trending topic on Twitter in Canada, so furiously were people on both sides of the issue tweeting. I mostly just observed, other than a mocking tweet to USian fetus fetishist Lila Rose.  Her cataclysmic dumbness was irresistible: she seems to think that a deluge of letters from Americans is just the leverage our Parliament needs to pass Motion 312.  If anything, more foreign letters compromise the fetus fetishists’ already-compromised letter campaign, but hey: it works for me.

The actual debate went about as expected, from what I saw. The motion’s sleazy sponsor, Stephen Woodworth, made his last stand, referring to non-sentient, non-autonomous zygotes as “people” while not granting women the same courtesy.  Maybe thoughtless, badly-written prose is to blame; or maybe women really don’t count as more than receptacles for the Almighty Fetus in Woodworth’s antiquated view.  (I’m pretty sure anti-choice women, quislings all, are by now immune to such contempt since their churches have been laying it on them for thousands of years).  Woodworth and his small cadre of supporters performed as expected, obfuscation, wordplay, sophistry and dishonest rhetoric about fetuses as a “class of people” being the order of the day.  Nothing new to see here.

Then the opposition rebuttals: I was impressed with the NDP’s Irene Mathyssen, who hauled Woodworth out to the woodshed for a well-deserved spanking…:

“This is quite literally a slap in the face to women who have fought long and hard for the right to control their own bodies and their ability to determine for themselves when they wish to have children,” NDP MP Irene Mathyssen said Friday during the final hour of debate.

“The member for Kitchener Centre’s desire to open up this debate has an end goal of changing the legislation to enable the fetus to be declared a human being,” Mathyssen said. “We are all very aware that such a change in the definition will directly place Canada on the regressive path to banning abortions.”

…then kicked his flabby fetus fetishizing ass around the block:

She slammed Woodworth for suggesting a “fertilized egg” is a “class of people” and cited case law that says otherwise.

Criminalizing abortion, she added, is only going to drive it underground, the consequences of which can be deadly.

Hear hear. I’m definitely non-partisan, but as fern hill tweeted earlier this week, I know who’s got my back when it comes to reproductive rights.

That Motion 312 is doomed by virtue of being a dimwitted and dishonest scrap of pious reproductive tyranny with little support among Canadians is a foregone conclusion, and yesterday’s debate did nothing to change that.  But I have to say: after all these years, seeing womens’ liberty re-litigated in Parliament (and so disingenuously at that) is somehow a little nauseating — even from the winning side.  I look forward to Wednesday’s vote, a short celebration, and then back to the barricades.