If you visit parts of France and Belgium, you can still see the lines of trenches left over from the battles of World War I, almost 100 years ago. Soldiers on either side dug them deep, and defended them ferociously for what must have seemed like forever.
The abortion debate is in many respects the same. Lines are drawn and never budge. The animosity can be intense. So when Kitchener MP Stephen Woodworth introduced his long-anticipated Motion 312 in Parliament on Thursday, the rhetoric was largely predictable. But one MP’s comments stood apart from the rest and, more importantly, hint at what is truly going on behind the scenes in the Conservative caucus.
Woodworth’s motion, which proposes Parliament strike a committee to re-examine the question of when human life begins, is a disingenuous attempt to recriminalize abortion through the back door. For if the committee comes back to Parliament suggesting that a fetus – or even a five-day-old fertilized egg – is a human being, or to use even more loaded language, a person, then it is a very short trip from that conclusion to declaring abortion nothing short of homicide.
