By
Joyce Arthur
November 2007
Some
of
In
a disturbing section of November’s The
Interim ("Canada's Life and Family newspaper"), five prominent anti-choice spokespersons
plus
an anti-choice columnist consider the
question of
criminal punishment for abortion, if abortion were to be made illegal
again.
Shockingly, four out of six believe women should be prosecuted and sent
to jail,
while the other two want women subjected to mental health treatment.
All six
want abortion providers to be prosecuted for murder.
The
majority of Canadians would likely be horrified by the idea of sending
women to
jail for having abortions. Most reasonable people would see it as
abhorrent and
heartlessly punitive – not to mention totally unrealistic, given the
large
numbers of women who resort to abortion even when it’s illegal. But the
unimaginable prospect and horrific consequences of trying to arrest and
jail
100,000 women a year in
Here’s
the words of the four who favour prosecution of women:
Mary Ellen Douglas, National Organizer for
Campaign Life Coalition, says: "We must not allow misdirected
compassion
for the mother to suggest that she and the person she hires to carry
out the
killing of her baby … should be above the law and receive no jail time.
… [Our]
desire for justice [for human life from the moment of conception]
demands that
severe penalties be given for crimes against the lives of defenceless
people. …
Jail time for those who commit the crime of abortion is not only just,
but
absolutely necessary."
Peter Ryan, Executive Director of
New Brunswick Right to Life, says: “Women who undergo abortions should
also be
held accountable for taking a human life. Here, the law should perhaps
resemble
its present provisions for infanticide, which take account of the
oft-present
element of emotional duress." He says the law should be crafted "to
distinguish between those who knowingly end a child's life and those
ignorant
about fetal life; that is, those who mistakenly assumed it was 'a blob
of
cells.' Crafting a law would be complex because of some dissimilarities
with
other homicides. But it could be done."
Rory Leishman, National Affairs columnist for the
Interim, says that in 1969, the view of Trudeau and Parliament was
that
"any mother who attempts to have her child illegally aborted should be
subject to up to two years' imprisonment. Few pro-lifers today would
quarrel
with that judgment," he claims. Leishman wants sex-selection abortion
to
be made a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment, and adds: "The
same
goes for any mother who would procure such an abortion. She, no less
than the
abortionist, should be subject to a severe criminal penalty."
The
issue of women’s punishment for the crime of illegal abortion became a
hot
issue only recently, when an American filmmaker questioned a group of
anti-abortion protesters outside a clinic in
You have rarely seen
people look more gobsmacked. It's as though the guy has asked them to
solve
quadratic equations. Here are a range of responses: "I've never really
thought about it." "I don't have an answer for that." "I
don't know." "Just pray for them.”
In
response to such questions posed to anti-abortionists, Rory Leishman writes in The
Interim: ”Many pro-lifers have been tongue-tied and for good
reason: the question is not amenable to any simple answer.”
From
the pro-choice point of view, however, the main reason most
anti-choicers have
never considered the question, or don’t want women punished, is because
the
anti-choice view of women is paternalistic and sexist. They don’t see
women as
morally capable of making their own rational decisions, especially when
it
comes to having an abortion. They believe women’s primary, ennobling
role is to
mothers, and that all women naturally want to be mothers. Women are
either not
in their right minds when they choose an abortion, or they are passive
victims
of an abortion foisted upon them—therefore they can’t be held
criminally
responsible.
This
is borne out by two of the responses in The
Interim from anti-choice spokespersons, who call for mental health
treatment for women who abort.
Natalie Hudson, Executive Director of Right to Life in
Theresa Smyth, Executive Director of Aid to
Women in
About
62% of Canadians “support
legal protection for the unborn” at some point before birth (according
to a
2007 poll commissioned by an anti-abortion group). But a different poll in 2002 found that
78% of
Canadians said Yes to the question: "Should women have
complete freedom on
their decision to have an abortion?" The startling contradiction
between
these findings probably means that people don't think through the
implications—namely, that conferring fetal rights means restricting
women's
rights.
We
can connect the dots between the wish to create legal rights for
fetuses, and
the wish to prosecute women for abortions. The result of both
objectives is the
same—pregnant women are criminalized and stripped of their rights. For
example,
the anti-choice movement in
Anti-choicers
seem to gloss over the apparently trivial matter of women’s rights—even
to the
extent of trampling over women’s dead bodies in their zeal to save the
lives of
fetuses. A recent study (by the World Health
Organization and the
Alan Guttmacher Institute) found
that women are just as likely to get an
abortion in countries
where it is outlawed as they are in countries where it is legal.
Half
of all abortions worldwide are unsafe and mostly illegal, with 70,000
women
dying every year, and five million left injured.
In
The
hard lesson learned by the developed world is that laws don’t
stop abortion. They only drive it underground, kill and maim women, and
turn
them into criminals just for being women. This lesson has been very
slow to
catch on in poorer countries still largely influenced by the Catholic
Church. For
example, Africa and