Parliament too scared of abortion to illegalize coercion

Well there seems to be one more example of the fact that not only does our government not care about the unborn lives ended by abortion, but also does not care about the women whose lives are scarred by it. In its rush to let women have abortions, on December 15th the parliament of our country once again voted to severely curtail the rights of women. Yesterday the long battle over Roxanne’s Law, a law that would make it illegal to force a woman into getting an abortion against her will, after frequent attempts to table the bill it finally failed with a vote of 178 votes against to 97 for it . There was no party that universally supported this, but there were 2 parties, the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP (whose leader I am ashamed to say represents my riding) which were universally opposed. The law was named after Roxanne Fernando, a young woman from Manitoba who was beaten to death by her boyfriend for refusing to get an abortion. At this point in reading about this, I had to ask what possible reason anyone would have for not supporting this. After all, the foundation of the pro-choice argument is that women have the right to choose. Now flawed as this argument is, surely even they would have to admit that if someone is being forced through the door of an abortion clinic, or worse being murdered by their boyfriend if they don`t, isn’t exactly free choice! Well, our elected officials had a quick answer to that question:

The Prime Minister has always said he wouldn’t support a bill that reopens the abortion debate.”

This is a clear indication of the state of reasoned political discourse in this country on complex moral issues, namely that it terrifies our leaders. We now have a situation where the idea of opening the door to the fact that abortion just might not be as cut and dried as Morgenthaler made it is seem is so terrifying that it has paralyzed people from acting on what should be a easy decision. Apparently they would rather send the message that forcing someone to get an abortion isn’t really coercion under the law. Now there are other arguments that people have given for not voting it down, saying that there are already laws on the books covering coersion, why have this one just because it includes abortion? Well this response by our elected officials in exactly why. Even they are so terrified of talking about abortion that they torpedo a bill which stops illegal coercion! No matter where you go no one is willing to talk about abortion other than to give a sound bite about choice. Meanwhile there are real live people out there who never hear the whole story about the horrors of abortion and are left with only the people around them, many of whom are fueled by there own selfish interests to guide them in this time. Coercion always thrives when no one is willing to debate issues they would rather not think about.