Mr. Gilles Duceppe (Laurier—Sainte-Marie, BQ):So, does Gilles Duceppe believe that if he keeps pushing the abortion funding issue, the debate will go away? Or maybe he hopes that if the government caves in and agrees to reinstate funding to pro-abortion groups, the pro-life side will concede defeat, the debate will stop, Cardinal Ouellet will apologize for his statements and we'll all be back to what Duceppe believes is "normal"?
Mr. Speaker, the Conservative government says it does not wish to reopen the abortion debate. Cardinal Ouellet candidly admitted yesterday that he was raising the abortion issue now because the Conservative government had revived the debate by excluding abortion from its maternal health policy for developing countries.
Does the Prime Minister realize that because of him and his refusal to include abortion in his maternal health policy for foreign nations the abortion debate is again raging in Canada and Quebec?
But wait, this heated discussion wasn't really about abortion. This was about whether or not Catholics should be allowed to hold office in the Conservative party. By raising the abortion funding issue for the umpteenth time, Duceppe was merely making yet another attempt to link Stephen Harper to the "religious right". Yep, it's 2010 already and they still try to portray Harper as "scary" - as if someone is going to believe them.
Oh, well, let them try. Maybe, as result of their efforts, Stephen Harper finally realizes that he better puts up effort to re-energize his own voting base, including the non-voting Social Conservatives, instead of appealing to the "progressives" of all stripes, most of whom have never voted Conservative and certainly never will. Meanwhile, the debate is going on:
In the past few months, both sides of the issue have accused their opponents of raising issues that should not be discussed because they are “divisive.” The idea that political debate should avoid topics on which there are disagreements is odd, especially when the parties are eager to manufacture disagreement on all other matters, even where none exists.The more the opposition parties push for abortion to be included in the maternal health package, the more of their pro-abort agenda will be exposed to the public. And, much to their surprise, some of their voters may actually not like it.
What drives the hostility to the government’s motherhood issue? Motherhood. The heart of the opposition to the initiative is its starting point – expectant mothers. To a certain cast of mind, considering women as mothers constitutes something of a retrograde step. Hence the objection that helping mothers to have safe deliveries is somehow illegitimate unless similar help is offered to women to avoid becoming mothers at all.
In most elite circles, the great social liberation of the past generations has been the liberation of women from the expectation, to say nothing of the reality, of motherhood. Indeed, liberation from the fear of motherhood due to easy contraception and unlimited abortion is considered perhaps the greatest item of social progress in the last half-century. Consequently, for a program to explicitly favour motherhood, even at the minimal level of ensuring safe deliveries, causes howls of outrage from those who think that African villagers should behave more like liberal society matrons – if one might use that pregnant word, figuratively speaking of course.
No comments:
Post a Comment