…but tell that to the gender fascists in various US jurisdictions busy jailing women who can’t fight back. Read this article to learn what these male supremacist sado-politicians are up to as I write this. In parts of the US, the Republic of Gilead has already arrived.
Item: a despondent pregnant woman attempts suicide. Her fetus dies. She’s charged with murder, and has spent the last year in jail.
Item: an African American teenager (well, who else would the cracker Mississippi “justice system” choose for a legal lynching?) is charged with murder because she had a stillbirth. The claims it was because she used drugs.
It’s hard to think Globe & Mail correspondent Doug Saunders was fully awake when he wrote this. If America is growing more “liberal,” it has a hell of a way of showing it.
And now this war on women will be coming to Canada—at least, if the benighted Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth and his powerful enablers get their way.
(If my tone offends, incidentally, so be it: I do not intend to engage in civil conversation with a legislator or his supporters who want for Canadian women what is already happening to the women I mentioned, and to countless others, in the Excited States of America. There is nothing remotely civil about what they are proposing; consequently, they deserve neither respect nor civility themselves.)
As I noted in December, Woodworth’s Motion 312 is only the latest salvo in the Harper government’s attempt to re-criminalize abortion. This is not merely some crazy backbencher doing his thing: nothing proceeds as far as this motion has done—actually getting accepted for debate in Parliament—without solid support from the PMO.
Most Canadians are opposed to a debate, or have no strong feelings about it. Those who favour one (34%) number fewer than the percentage of the vote that Harper won last year. The upcoming House of Commons travesty is, not to put too fine a point upon it, an abomination. Would Canadians want their representatives discussing the merits of a return to slavery, or a Canadian version of the Nuremberg Laws?
Canadians won’t stand for relegating more than half the population to second-class citizenship. And those who want to argue the contrary, or “discuss” it, can find some other site to spew their misogyny. Common decency requires that it not happen here.
[H/t Fern Hill]