While I appreciate my last post wasn't a big hit (maybe because of its length, maybe its dry content) I hope you will enjoy this a little more, and maybe generate more discussion. I'm sorry for the impersonal blogging lately, but I have been insanely busy between packing up for my flight on Sat and finishing up my work at the middle school. This article from eye magazine was brought to my attention by my fabulous boyfriend. Dr. Henry Morgentaler is being honored this week by my Alma Matter, the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Morgentaler's honorary degree from UWO was a polarizing issue for London residents. Local Catholic boards were told to discourage their students from applying to the University, even though it has the leading Dental, Medical and Law school for the Province. They even convinced high school students to wear black armbands in protest. In this editorial, a case from Texas is discussed that proves to me that we are getting closer and closer to losing reproductive rights everyday. eye - 06.16.05
Abortion in the first degree
Henry Morgentaler, Canada's
pioneering abortion doctor, was in the news last week, because his precedent-setting 1988 court case was cited in the controversial Supreme Court decision allowing private health insurance, and again because he's receiving an honorary degree from the University of Western Ontario in London.
This one-two punch neatly fits the impression most Canadians carry about the state of the abortion debate in Canada. The Supreme Court builds on the legal roads Morgentaler paved, while the academy celebrates his life over the small but noisy protest (a petition was signed; Catholic school students wore black arm bands) of the marginalized pro-life movement.
Meanwhile, in Texas,
19-year-old Gerardo Flores was convicted of two counts of capital murder and sentenced to at least
40 years in prison for helping his then-
16-year-old girlfriend, Erica Basoria,
terminate her pregnancy. He could have been sentenced to death, but his prosecutors didn't seek capital punishment.
How's that, then? Roe v. Wade hasn't been overturned, has it? Not yet, but while American conservatives wait for Dubya to stack the bench with pro-lifers so they can criminalize abortion, they've also been working to undermine safe, legal abortion in other ways.
They do this by
limiting access to abortion, refusing public funding for it and harassing women who seek it out and medical professionals who perform it. In Texas, a
minor needs consent from her parents to have an abortion, and the
government only pays for it in cases of rape, incest or danger to a woman's life. Finally, lawmakers in Texas define human life as beginning at conception so that those who kill fetuses can be charged with
murder (other states have similar laws). Of course, Roe v. Wade requires exemptions to this law, so women cannot be prosecuted for ending their own pregnancies, nor can medical professionals who perform abortions.
Anyone else is fair game.
That's the law that applies in Flores' case. According to his and Basoria's testimony, they didn't want to have the twins she was carrying. At 20 weeks into her pregnancy, Basoria
could still have had a legal abortion, but it would have had to be performed in a hospital, which is quite expensive. And her parents were against it.
So Flores, on several occasions over a one-week period, stepped on Basoria's belly while, the defence claims, she hit herself in an attempt to induce a miscarriage. They succeeded in terminating the pregnancy.
The case was complicated -- Basoria was hospitalized with bruises and prosecutors alleged that Flores was abusing her. But these elements are beside the point. Flores wasn't charged with beating his girlfriend; he was charged with
murder. The prosecutor's language couldn't be more revealing of the Texas legal system's attitude toward the status of life in the womb: "
Those babies could not raise their hands in self-defence to say, 'No, Daddy, no, Daddy!'" No one would ever get to see those boys' first steps or take their prom photos, he's further cited as saying in the Lufkin Daily News, the local paper. One wonders if his argument would apply any less to a hospital abortion.
The danger here is the
buildup of legal precedent acknowledging that terminating a pregnancy is homicide. Even if, right now, women and their doctors are protected, what's to stop a crusading prosecutor from charging a Planned Parenthood counsellor with conspiring to commit murder? How large a leap is it then to say that the right of one (as yet unborn) citizen to live should trump Roe v. Wade's guarantees of another citizen's right to privacy? It's a slippery slope, and anti-abortion forces in the US government continue to grease it.
Gerardo Flores' case should be embraced as a cause célèbre by pro-choice activists around the world. Forty years in jail for ending a pregnancy at a woman's request -- admittedly in a foolish and dangerous way -- is an outrage.
But moreover, it should remind us here in Canada that, as Jefferson's well-worn aphorism has it, "
the price of freedom is eternal vigilance." As eye reporter Nicole Cohen pointed out in a story last year ("Choice and access," City, Apr. 22, 2004), the freedom of choice we take for granted in cities today is already partly illusory and constantly threatened. Only
20 per cent of Canadian hospitals provide abortions; the three vast northern territories have only one hospital each that performs abortions;
Prince Edward Island has no facilities providing abortions; and Manitoba, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick do not offer any funding for abortions performed in clinics. RU-486, the abortion pill, remains illegal.
There's a thriving and vocal pro-life movement in Canada. Like their friends in the US, they'll persist in their fight to limit -- and eventually eliminate -- access to safe, legal abortions.
The 79 per cent of Canadians who believe abortion should remain a woman's choice must persist, too. While we're honouring the work of Dr. Henry Morgentaler, we need to take up his fight. What has concerned pro-choicers of late is that it won't take one swift movement to destroy the rights we have worked so hard for but for many smaller ones to run all we hold sacred into the ground. Cases like these only prove that those without the legal and medically safe means will find other ways that can potentially kill the mother. -L
