Friday, December 29, 2006

Back Door Abortion Ban

I found this particularly unnerving considering the impact the social conservatives have had on Tory Government policy.

The ability of REAL Women to whisper in the Ministers ear and watch the Status of Women, their favorite bug a boo, be eliminated.

Now this....



Tories use Grits' silent-night tactics

The Edmonton Journal

Published: Friday, December 29, 2006

Canadians' fond hopes that Stephen Harper's government would be cleaner and more transparent than its Liberal predecessor may be dissipating in the wake of two announcements the prime minister tried to slip under the radar during the holiday season.

On the eve of the Christmas weekend, Harper unveiled a 10-member panel to oversee and make policy recommendations on reproductive technologies and stem-cell research.

The panel, led by Nova Scotia's former Conservative premier John Hamm, does not include any scientists specializing in the subject. It does, however, include a number of medical doctors (including Hamm) and conservative bioethicists who have been outspoken critics of abortion, research in stem cells and reproductive technologies.

The role of the board is to monitor the medical activities at Canada's in-vitro-fertilization clinics and the publicly funded research being undertaken in Canada's universities, and to make policy recommendations to the government.

The long-overdue creation of the panel, which was called for in the 1993 Royal commission on reproductive technologies, is welcomed by many in the field. What is controversial is who the Harper cabinet has chosen to put on the board, and how they were selected -- a fact the prime minister obviously understood, putting the decision out in an unheralded press release on the Friday afternoon before the Christmas holiday.

When it became clear the move had not gone unnoticed, a spokesman for Health Minister Tony Clement said Wednesday Canadians have nothing to fear from the fact that religious conservatives are well represented on the panel, while scientists and patients' rights groups are not. But neither Harper nor Clement himself have come forward to answer questions about the panel.

In other words by having a panel of social conservatives who oppose abortion what position do you think they will have on embryonic stem cell research? In fact what might their recommendations be about the source of those embryos, which includes aborted as well as surplus frozen embryos.

Woman Will Take Fight for Frozen Embryos to Ireland's Supreme Court

Think not. Then why the 4pm press release on the Friday of Christmas weekend. Christmas, christ child, birth in a manger. Signaling to the Anti-Abortion lobby that all was right with the world.

See

Abortion


Stem Cell Research

Cloning

Feminism

Status of Women


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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The "Back Door Abortion Ban" title is misleading. There is nothing in the article that suggests that the Tory government is considering an abortion ban.

EUGENE PLAWIUK said...

Of course there was nothing in the article suggesting that, I was suggesting that. Did you fail to understand the point of my article? That by using Reproductive Technology as the excuse the right wing fetus fetishists have an angle to lobby the government to begin to restrict abortions in relationship to stem cell research. That seems clear to me, and its the very essence of backdoor politics.

Anonymous said...

Harper's trying to run the same way that Ralph Klein did - quietly, doing as much as possible behind closed doors.

This particular little bit of slime is nothing more than playing to his "base", and enacting the "agenda" that he claimed didn't exist during the last election.

In short, the man lied through his teeth to Canadians.