Toronto March for LifeThe last time cabinet minister Maryam Monsef made the news, the occasion was her bungled handling of the Liberals’ short-lived plan to enact electoral reform. Now, Monsef has appeared in headlines across the country saying that denying someone access to the violence of abortion is itself violence. From Maclean’s:
Status of Women Minister Maryam Monsef says denying access to the full range of reproductive services — including abortion — is a form of violence against women.
“Reproductive health rights in Canada and around the world are critical to advancing gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls,” Monsef said Thursday in an interview with The Canadian Press.
“We’re committed to making sure that women and girls have that choice, because otherwise, this is a form of gender-based violence.”
Considering that Monsef was born in Iran and grew up in Afghanistan, one would think she might be inclined to use her influence alleviating the genuine oppression of women that occurs in much of the Islamic world. Instead, the abortion dogmatism of the Trudeau gang has resulted in a focus on something much more important: the ability of women to have fetal exterminators empty their uteruses.
The irony becomes sicker when you consider the fact that abortion is not the tool of women’s liberation trumpeted by the Western feminists, but has been used worldwide as a lethal weapon against the tiniest and weakest group of females on earth: girls in the womb. Dr. Anna Higgins lays out the appalling reality in her paper Sex-Selection Abortion: The Real War on Women:
Sex-selective abortion is a well-known problem in China and India, where a cultural preference for sons, coupled with political and economic influences, has severely skewed sex ratios at birth (SRBs). Instances of sex discrimination perpetrated via abortion and infanticide are well documented and have resulted in millions of “missing” girls in some societies. In China, for example, men outnumber women to the tune of 33 million. More than 20 years ago, Amartya Sen (1990) documented that 100 million girls and women were “missing” from the global population as a consequence of neglect, infanticide, and inequalities in care. The figure is now estimated to be in excess of 160 million, with sex-selective abortion playing a major role (Hvistendahl 2011). Such practices constitute a real “war on women” and have been widely condemned. Those who claim to be concerned with women’s rights can no longer ignore the need to ban sex-selective abortion in order to protect girls from “gendercide.”
This problem is present in the Western world, as well. Sex-selection abortion is now practiced by some communities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and right here at home in Canada. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation revealed through a hidden-camera investigation that the abortion industry was more than happy to target baby girls for abortion on request, and their resulting report “Unnatural Selection” prompted journalists to ask Justin Trudeau to condemn the practice. The self-proclaimed feminist prime minister, of course, responded by saying that his party considered sex-selection abortion a right. In Trudeau’s world, nothing trumps abortion—not even a devastating rise in female feticide.
I’m fully aware that there is no statistic terrifying enough, no story awful enough, and no abortion senseless enough to force Trudeau, Monsef, and the rest of the feticide fanatics to question their rigid ideology. But for those willing to reconsider, I’ll leave you with an anecdote first published by The Economist in their 2010 report “The worldwide war on baby girls”:
XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’
“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’
“‘But that’s…murder…and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”
Liberals may recoil at such stories, but the sad fact is that it is the same here in Canada: Our abortion clinics “do baby girls,” too—because in Canada’s current abortion regime, overseen by our feminist leaders, “girl babies don’t count.”
