I have been shocked by the recent resurgence of mainstream commentary and discussion about Women’s rights to reproductive freedom, including the right to choose abortion. Of course, I shouldn’t be, because I should probably know by now that as a woman, my rights are never truly secure.
Stephen Harper and his Conservative representatives are refusing to even discuss funding abortion as a means of providing women around the world with reproductive freedom at the G8 meeting. Recently, a representative of the Catholic church suggested that allowing a woman who was impregnated via rape to abort the fetus is a process of double victimization – first the woman is “victimized” by rape, and then the fetus is “victimized’ by abortion. At the University of Victoria (UVic), an anti-choice student club called Youth Protecting Youth (YPY) is suing the University of Victoria Students’ Society for denying their “Free Speech” by refusing them club status and funding. I was a student at UVic when this issue first arose several years ago, and it emerged something like this: YPY posted truly offensive and violent posters that positioned women who undergo abortions as murderers of society’s already oppressed and dispossessed – children born of rape, people with disabilities, etc etc. I was one of the students who tore down their posters and fought to have YPY denied the right to post them. That turned into a debate about whether they should even be allowed to be an offical club. The official stance of the University of Victoria Student’s Society (UVSS) is pro-choice…so it didn’t make much sense for the UVSS to fund an anti-choice group, or award them club status. The fundamental purpose and ideology of YPY contradicts the values and goals, and definition of freedom, put forth by the UVSS. YPY sees this as a denial of Free Speech. I see it as a rejection of violent, oppressive, and misogynistic practices in a declared pro-choice union and group.
As we know, women’s right to abortion in Canada exists in a sort of legal vaccuum – it is not illegal, but neither is it fully legalized, or formally recognized in law as a human right. My sense is that for a long time, pro-choice activists have been reluctant to push for full legalization, because it risks reopening the law for debate and commentary, and therefore losing. While it would be proposterous for the Canadian government to revoke women’s right to abortion, that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be a hefty battle if the law was reopened.
So much about mainstream commentary about abortion makes my blood boil. Often, women and their rights to control their own bodies and lives are completely absent in discussions about abortion. Anti-choice groups are often able to procure a great deal of funding from religious and conservative organizations, and this in turn translates to power and privilege in the “debate” that they themselves create. Generally speaking, feminist and pro-choice organizations are less well-funded and economically privileged. The reality that a fetus is incapable of existing in a living state outside of a woman’s body is ignored. One slim definition of morality is held above material reality, and the material reality of women’s lives is denied moral character. There is just so much that is incredibly agitating and muddled when abortion is discussed, and too rarely are feminist and pro-choice perspectives truly heard and honoured.
How do we confront the resurgence of mainstream anti-choice ideology? Do we need to be organizing more actively and regularly around pro-choice politics and social movement? If we accept that the terms of the mainstream abortion “debate” are stagnant, but that it is raging on and continuing to be disseminated, where do we go from here?
