David Warren writes:
I have before me a packet of cigarettes with a Health Canada message in capital letters that reads: "Cigarettes hurt babies." The text underneath this begins, "Tobacco use during pregnancy reduces the growth of babies." Since an accompanying photograph further shows a pregnant woman smoking, it was unnecessary to specify "unborn." Similarly, when we are discussing abortion, it is unnecessary to specify that the babies in question are "unborn."
To which Antonia replies:
Ah yes. Legal definitions by cigarette packet. As if the definition of personhood wasn't already settled in Canada.
She completely misses the point. Which is this:
Indeed, the refusal to use plain language, the substitution of euphemisms and rhetorical evasions, is an infallible indicator that a speaker or writer feels uncomfortable with the truth.
The government of Canada, which supposedly has settled the issue of the personhood of the unborn child (it has not!) uses its power to warn women against harming their (unborn) baby.
There is a lot of pretense when it comes to issues surrounding the unborn. Joyce Arthur says that society will never come to a consensus, i.e. that there can never be a consensus surrounding fetal personhood, therefore it shouldn't be settled (which is the case right now in Canada).
Antonia says the issue is settled.
I wish the poor choicers would get their story straight!
It's actually not settled. The Supreme Court referred the issue back to Parliament. But Parliament never acted on the issue of fetal personhood. There was a bill regulating abortion. But that's not quite the same thing.
Antonia Zerbisias and her like-minded allies are afraid to speak plainly the truth: that abortion kills a prenatal human being, and that this killing of a prenatal human being is supposed to be a means of reducing maternal mortality.
Well, that's the subterfuge. Feminists don't really support abortion as a means to save women from childbirth. After all, childbirth has been rendered pretty safe in this day and age.
They just want abortion, period. Regardless of whether it reduces maternal mortality or not.
David Warren is correct: Feminists skate around the issue. It's not about the unborn for them. It's an uncomfortable issue. Killing for the sake of female emancipation. Kind of touchy. Best to focus on "women controlling their own bodies." The ends justifies the means. Antonia never comes out and say it: even if a human being must die, so what?
Quite apart from the fact Warren will never get pregnant, never experience morning sickness, bladder pressure, swollen feet and weight gain, back pain, sleeplessness plus the feeling of being ripped apart by a watermelon at delivery, which, as we all know, is just like "sitting inside a car,'' isn't it special that he thinks that a fetus could survive on its own from the time of conception? That it need not be implanted in a uterus to develop? That it need not feed through an umbilical cord?
Tired old rhetoric. Since I have had three pregnancies and am still of child bearing age, it falls upon me to shore up the authority of David Warren's statement:
What David Warren said was true. So there.
But of course, a leftist would object to me for some other reason. I'm too privileged. Then I could find a poor single mother to agree to David Warren's message. A leftist would find some objection with her, too. She's not in a crisis situation. We could find a poor single mom in a crisis situation to agree to that statement, and the leftist would STILL find something objectionable...
See, among leftists, when people speak ideas that they do not agree with, they look to the characteristics of the messenger to find something objectionable to dismiss the statement. It's a kind of fallacy. David Warren could never be pregnant, so automatically, that statement is self-serving. He could never suffer the effects of his beliefs, so it must not be true.
Of course anyone with two brain cells realizes that that's bunk. But it's all about, power, identity and results for the left. The substance of a belief is far less important to them than the one who speaks it and the end result in their ongoing identity politics crusade.
Of course, she might also say: it's not true, therefore, the automatic explanation is that he's using self-serving rhetoric to keep women down.
Leftists always doubt the motives of those they oppose; because opposition to their "obviously" sensible beliefs must be explained somehow. It can't just be a question of disagreement. As in the days of the Inquisition, dissent must be due to some willful disbelief against the "obvious".
But it's the metaphor simile that grates. It merely reinforces the notion that these men -- since most of them are men -- who are always railing about how abortion is murder, never think of pregnant women as anything more than a vessel for the fetal payload.
What about women who rail that abortion is murder?
I consider myself much more than a "vessel" for fetal payload.
It's precisely the fact that I am a thoughtful, mindful, responsible human being that I should be responsible for another human life. Women ARE equal to men. That's why they should be both equally responsible for preserving the lives of unborn children.
Now why can't a man think that?
It has nothing to do with his identity. It has everything to do with the substance of the belief.
Which she never addresses. It's all about gender conflict. He's the big bad man with an idea she doesn't like, so her response is to condemn his statement based on his gender, not on its merits.
Sexism, anyone?
