Tory MP Wants Parliament to Reopen Abortion Debate

For the first 'ugh' of Christmas, the Tories gave to me...

This morning, we received a last-minute Christmas gift, courtesy of the Conservative backbenches, that next to no one in the country would ever want: a promise to reopen the debate over abortion! Stephen Woodworth, a Tory MP from Kitchener, Ont., sent out this little missive (via David Akin):

MP Stephen Woodworth calls for another look at Canada’s 400 Year Old Law

A recent poll disclosed that 80% of Canadians believe that Canadian law protects the fundamental human rights of children before birth in the later stages of gestation.

In fact, the opposite is true. Canadian law provides no human rights protection whatsoever for children before the moment of complete birth. This results from an unusual Canadian statute which defines a human being as a child who has completely proceeded in a living state from the mother’s body, whether or not the child has breathed. This means that in Canada a child is legally considered to be sub-human while his or her little toe remains in the birth canal, even if he or she is breathing.

This law was first formulated prior to the seventeenth century, when an early version of it was recorded in Coke’s Institutes of Law. In those times, medical science and principles of human rights were not sufficiently advanced to challenge such a law.

The important question is whether this 400 year old Canadian law is supported by 21st century medical science and principles of human rights. Perhaps Canadians should at least examine this question. MP Stephen Woodworth proposes that Parliament has a responsibility to lead that examination.

Now, if you boil down the text, which CBC's Kady O'Malley called "so oblique and cautious as to be incoherent", you'll find that Woodworth wants to "examine" whether Canada's current abortion laws (or lack thereof) properly protect the human rights of the unborn child. Of course, no mention is made of the human rights of the women carrying the child, but that's just too complex to put into a news release, right? Anyhow, we're curious (not that we'll ever know) just what the reaction to this message is in the Prime Minister's Office. After all, the PM has made it known he doesn't want to reopen that debate, but this is at least the second Tory MP to flaunt anti-abortion messages. Perennial foot-in-mouther Brad Trost, who represents a Saskatoon-area riding, has urged anti-abortion activists to ramp up their message this year to get the government to reverse funding it gave to Planned Parenthood. Now, in an ideal world, one in which every word uttered by a parliamentarian isn't torqued by competing politicians or muddled by the media, and emotions are checked at the door to Parliament, and the most radical activists on either side of the debate just shut up for a minute, there could very well be a mature, reasonable discussion over just what this country's laws on abortion should be, owing to the vacuum left by the Supreme Court's decision to strike the old ones down in 1993. As such, there's only one mention of unborn children in the Criminal Code, which describes them, as Woodworth notes, as living only once they've completely exited the birth canal. But we don't live in such a reasonable world, and definitely won't be anytime soon, so please, Mr. Woodworth, in the spirit of the holidays, just can it.