Letters 4 Life: Freeping V.M312

I can hardly stand another Motion 312 post, and you probably feel the same way.  But 17 days away from the final vote and certain demise of the motion, and the subsequent MASS persecutiongasm, there will be more to say on this sordid subject, so bear with me.

One of the antichoice initiatives launched in support of Motion 312 is something called “Letters 4 Life”, which for the last few months has been gamely trying to get 100,000 letters sent to Parliament by the day of the vote. 100,000 is a nice round number, and presumably L4L means to give the impression that 100,000 Canadians are so strongly opposed to abortion rights that they’ve been driven to penning shrieking spittle-flecked screeds to Harper et al.  A few days ago they had 65,000 letters sent – not too bad, assuming they were from 65,000 individuals. But some people just can’t resist snarking off:

That was obviously the incentive they needed because a couple of days later the number of letters went PARABOLIC:

But why not?  Anything’s possible, with the Power of Prayer.

No, I wasn’t buying that either, so I decided to find out if there might be something other than Prayer Power behind the MASSIVE spike in letter-writing.

My first stop was the L4L site’s “letter tracker”.  This is where letter-writing fetus fetishists record how many letters they sent, and apparently they’re being encouraged to send hundreds…

…and proving themselves more than up to the task.  To wit, on L4L’s Facebook page there’s a post from someone who thinks 30 letters from one individual isn’t very many:

…so she grabs the crack pipe and suddenly she’s banging them out at top speed:

Yay Nancy, Freeper Extraordinaire!  I wonder how many others are cranking out letters at this rate?  I had been under the impression that “100,000” meant 100,000 individuals sending one(1) letter, but it could just as easily be 200 wired-up Nancies, each churning out a frenzied 5 or 600 letters.

The letter tracker’s question “Do you live in Canada” was also intriguing and more than a little sinister.  I fired up the Googles for some investigative blogging and instantly hit paydirt in the form of an obscure little American website, the Teenage Life Club, flogging their own ‘Stand for Life’ antichoice campaign that advises sending messages to the White House… and Congress… and… the Canadian Government??:

Really, eh?  If some  little high school club is doing this, presumably they’re not the only ones: they had to get the idea from somewhere.  I checked in on Nurse Stanek’s Sweet & Sour Fetus Cafe & Quik-Lube, and sure enough she has an article about the “Stand Up For Life” campaign, with a link to the site.  “Letters 4 Life” is mentioned at Stanek’s without a direct link, but at least some of her substantial and furiously zealous traffic would find its way there from the Teenage Life Club’s site.  I wonder how many other US sites are telling their readers to write letters to the Canadian government?

I sincerely doubt that a small number of people — some of whom aren’t even eligible to vote here — obsessively sending thousands of form letters to Parliament will tell our elected officials anything other than who CSIS should be keeping an eye on.

BONUS TRACK:

Nancy x10?

P’wndering the Non-Debate Debate & Subsquent Foolish Fallout

So that happened.

I was unfortunately waylaid by a flu bug of such savage magnitude that I was unable to participate in any bursting of blogs, but it seems to have all worked out for the good.  Motion 312 was exposed for the sleazy little fetus-humping sham it is, an attack on womens’ rights unworthy of the time and taxpayer dollars wasted on debating it.

The highlight was MP Stephen Woodworth, the source of this demented irritant, being given a top-drawer pro-choice asskicking by his own caucus whip, Gordon O’Connor, while the world watched.  Among other things, O’Connor reminded Woodworth in no uncertain terms that the House is neither a medical nor religious body:

The House of Commons, however, is not a laboratory. It is not a house of faith, an academic setting or a hospital. It is a legislature, and a legislature deals with law, specifically, in this case, subsection 223(1) of the Criminal Code.

Woohoo!  Go Gordio!  But this little nugget was my personal favourite:

The decision of whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is essentially a moral decision, and in a free and democratic society, the conscience of the individual must be paramount and take precedence over that of the state.

Hear hear!  And here here!

But predictably, in the wake of the M312 debate we’ve been beset by a frenzy of furious pearl-clutching over Canada’s lack of legislation governing this personal medical decision.  Apparently “Canada needs a proper open debate on abortion policy” because the status quo isn’t what the Supreme Court intended.

Well guess what: the status quo isn’t what anyone thought would happen.  Back in 1988, even I assumed that eventually abortion would be codified in some kind of law.  I doubt anyone could have imagined that Canada was about to embark on a 24-year experiment in glorious “lawlessness” that would work out so incredibly well.  An experiment in which women and doctors proved themselves more than capable, thankyouverymuch, of making these kinds of decisions and regulating themselves without the long hairy arm of the State reaching in and using its coercive power to manipulate private lives.  An experiment that concluded with a lower abortion rate.

Could it be that women and doctors know better than government bureaucrats?  Say it ain’t so.

In fact, our “experiment” worked out so fantastically well that the only answer to the suggestion that Canada needs abortion legislation is…

Why?

(h/t AntoniaZ)