Conservative backbencher keeps abortion debate alive with attack on Canada’s ‘extremist’ origins of life law

MP Stephen Woodworth will soon introduce a motion urging Parliament to affirm
“that every Canadian law must be interpreted in a manner which recognizes in law
the equal worth and dignity of everyone who is in fact a human being.”

WATERLOO, ONT. — The last time the University of Waterloo hosted a talk by Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth, who is on the cutting edge of Canada’s underground abortion debate, he was shouted down by a man dressed as a six-foot-tall pink vagina, known as Vulveta.

This time, things were different. The man in the genitalia — Ethan Jackson, a fourth-year women and gender studies and religion student at nearby Wilfrid Laurier University — is banned from the Waterloo campus, as was a fellow protester.

So Mr. Woodworth’s rescheduled talk went ahead Thursday night under heavy police protection, as officers patrolled empty hallways and medics sat at the ready outside a poky little second-floor classroom, half-filled with the school’s anti-abortion club.

Half a dozen demonstrators, one in a shirt declaring pride in her abortion, vainly offered pamphlets at a hallway table.

As Canada gears up for a historic reckoning of the laws that govern medical care at the end of life, it is instructive to witness the sorry state of discourse over the beginnings of life — a debate that alternates between a raucous bun fight and a somnolent mass, and answers micro-managed debate with performance art protest.  (more...)

Conservative backbencher keeps abortion debate alive with attack on Canada’s ‘extremist’ origins of life law