Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Monday, April 30, 2012

Conservative anti-abortion debate ends in shock, awe, giggles

When does human life begin? When strangers’ eyes meet across a crowded room, obviously. It’s romantic, it’s wild, it’s out of control and kind of sticky.

But Kitchener MP Stephen Woodworth thinks it’s less fun than that. On Thursday in the House of Commons, he raised the magic moment of conception and its progress, defying Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s wish not to reopen the abortion debate.

For Harper does realize that ending abortion rights is a giant Wildrose-lake-of-fire loser of votes for him.

Woodworth asked MPs to vote for Motion 312 to set up a committee to decide when pregnancy gets its start. This might lead to altering the Criminal Code and amending homicide laws to prosecute women for murder if they have abortions.

Woodworth always insisted 312 was purely an intellectual inquiry. But he slipped up, perhaps out of nervousness, suddenly telling Radio Canada mid-week, “It certainly allows us to have an honest discussion about the abortion question.”

Though I do understand that the right’s efforts to destroy the 1988 Morgentaler decision by the Supreme Court of Canada are pregnancy-related, they seem just as much to do with sexual intercourse, nasty and dirty as it is.

I have taken on Woodworth before, partly because he seems temperamentally ill-suited to ruling on sexual matters. During his moment in the sun/almost empty House, he read entirely from script and made awkward hand gestures to show passion of a sort.

In contrast, his opponents were on fire. High praise for Quebec, whose MPs were brisk and contemptuous. B.C. Liberal Hedy Fry is one of nature’s demolitionists. And Niki Ashton of the NDP — so young, so smart — spoke about young women, especially the ones demonstrating outside Parliament in the red gowns of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

As it turned out, Woodworth, poor man, was publicly battered and fried by Conservative whip Gordon O’Connor, who, as Kady O’Malley of the CBC wrote, gave the “most stridently pro-choice speech of the debate.”

If I were Woodworth, I would have gone home and cried in my bath. But I’m not. Woodworth doubtless had quotes to comfort himself until the actual vote in the fall when he will again shoot out quote after lofty quote. From “Oriental proverbs” (sic) to Martin Luther King to Emile Zola, Woodworth was a righteous quotemaster.

Oh, I can out-quote him. So I ask again, when does life, this cosmic giggle, get its start?

The sperm: Me! I beat 280 million lesser sperm to get to this fortunate egg. Life began when I was formed inside my carrier human — some guy named Jason or The Bobster — and raced to glory on a starry night.

The egg: When I was pierced at random by the pushiest and most boastful of the lot. I had no say in this. Typical.

Zola, in Therese Raquin: “She held Laurent, drunk with passion, to her breast, and in that bare and freezing bedroom there were enacted scenes of fiery passion, sinister and brutal. Each new meeting brought still more violent ecstasies.”

Dr. Henry Morgentaler: It’s up to the woman. “Every child a wanted child.”

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer: Two weeks before the sperm met the egg — when your last period ended — which means that unless you pre-aborted, you are legally pregnant and you’ll stay that way in the state of Arizona, missy.

Your mother: At the wedding. Two years later and I still have no grandchild?

George Carlin: “If a fetus is a human being, how come the census doesn’t count them?”

Samuel Beckett: “We are born straddling the grave.”

Dr. Seuss: “Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them. You make ‘em, I amuse ‘em.”

O’Connor: “Abortion is part of the human condition. It cannot be eliminated.”

Harper: “I will be voting against the motion.”

Me: Did I hear that correctly? Had the planet spun suddenly on its axis?

It had.

I’m not saying the Conservatives are sincere, merely canny as usual. But the House of Commons is the best theatre going. I now find Tory MP Gordon O’Connor strangely attractive. And you can quote me.

Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Heather Mallick

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