Judy Rebick's dogma

 

Last weekend, obedient to my son (and editor) Jonathan Kay’s Facebook invitation, I listened to the most recent edition of CBC Radio’s “Q,” on whose panel he is a regular contributor, along with John Cruikshank, publisher of the Toronto Star and Judy Rebick, publisher of rabble.ca.

Host Jian Ghomeshi gave half the time to to the media’s treatment of Justin Trudeau’s ill-conceived abortion gambit which, far from “settling” the matter and winning praise from women as he intended, has pried open a pandora’s box of opinion—mostly negative concerning his political judgment and miscomprehension of women’s Charter rights—spurring a debate about abortion regulation that would never have arisen, had he not, in lawyerly parlance, “opened the door” to it.

Cruikshank and Kay make fine sparring partners. Kay offers a centre-right perspective, and Cruikshank a centre-left perspective, but the key word here is “perspective.” Neither is an ideologue, meaning neither feels bound to ignore or cherry pick evidence in order to arrive at a foregone conclusion. They are both thoughtful, independent thinkers, and, in response to objective evidence, can surprise us at times, which to me is the hallmark of a desirable commentator.

Rebick, on the other hand, does not surprise the listener. Ever. How can she? As a professional advocate, she is obliged to toe the same Marxist/feminist party line she has promoted in every job she has held throughout her entire career. Which means she is bound to ignore or denigrate facts that cast those dogmas in a dubious light.

On the abortion file, Rebick is committed to dogmas that were written in stone decades ago—before ultrasounds that humanized the fetus, sex selection abortions and research that, for example, has established causal links between more than one induced abortion and the risk of premature birth in future pregnancies. All of these factors have caused many people, including myself, who were once reflexively pro-choice, to interrogate our assumptions and to view Canada’s lack of an abortion law with concern. We are still pro-choice in principle, but we want regulations similar to those prevailing in Europe and Scandinavia, hardly redoubts of the pro-life movement. We should really be described as Abortion Sceptics, so that discussion is not needlessly polarized between “pro-choice” (which has come to mean no law and no debate about a law) and “anti-choice,” an inaccurate term Rebick implicitly assigned to me (“some [anti-choicers] are writing for the National Post”) and which I resent.

Rebick did not address the issue of sex-selection abortion, but she did address late-term abortions, which offend most Canadians. Her position is that since only 1% of abortions are performed after 20 weeks, and “not a single doctor or facility [in Canada] will perform an abortion after 26 weeks,” there is no need for a regulation; “it’s regulated by the medical profession.”

That isn’t quite true.  For example, the Morgentaler clinics, while they do not themselves perform post-20 week abortions, will refer clients to other clinics in Canada or the U.S. that do. And we don’t know how many are performed in Canada, because certain provinces like B.C. and Quebec and Ontario don’t make figures available, and because abortions performed in private physician’s offices have never been published. (In April, 2012 a Quebec radio show caller-in said she was 33 and had had five abortions, one at 26 weeks, for no medical reason.) Moreover, Statistics Canada—Rebick’s stated source for data—reports that from 2000-2009 there were 491 late-term, born-alive abortions performed in Canada, with 119 such babies in 2010-2011 alone that were left to die outside the womb. Rebick did not mention that.

Some of us—not Catholic or Evangelicals, not scare-mongers, just thoughtful people who adjust our perspectives according to evidence—consider those babies to have been murdered. Who could possibly object to a regulation that would guarantee such barbarism could no longer happen in Canada?

A militant ideologue pickled in Marxist brine, that’s who.

As American author Upton Sinclair once said,  “It is difficult to get a man [or a woman] to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” That is the position in which Judy Rebick finds herself all too often on the air. I understand the CBC’s wish for gender balance on their shows. But surely there must be a female pundit in Toronto who has the requisite intelligence, as well as the curiosity and openness to evolving evidence on sensitive issues like this, who would enliven the exchange with apolitical spontaneity rather than dragging it down with wearisomely predictable scripts. The CBC is not treating the majority of its women listeners with the respect they deserve.

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Prince Arthur Herald