Now is the time

Please call or write your MP and indicate your support for Ken Epp's Unborn Victims of Crime Bill, scheduled for a vote on March 5.

Thank you.


Update! The bad news according to MDL is that the Harper government expects to be defeated on the budget March 4. Bob Fife says Dion wants to pull the trigger. Election sometime in April.

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Related: Murdered mom's family want unborn victims of violence covered by law - Province.

Victim's sister presses for change - Vancouver Sun.

Fighting for the Right to Live - Leader-Post.

Unborn Victims of Crime Bill still getting resistance

Why is it that most of us feel some kind of extra revulsion when a pregnant woman is murdered, but yet the Canadian public is so reluctant to call for additional punishment for the perpetrators?

The Unborn Victims of Crime Bill is still being bogged down by opposition parties and abortion activists who fear it is a slippery slope to the notion of 'personhood' for the fetus.

Perish the thought.


In other news, Kiera Tetley, who was only about one month away from being born, was murdered in Winnipeg on Tuesday, along with her mother Joanne Nadine Hoeppner.


Mother and sister now dead:

Tacked on the fridge of the battered green house was an image from a recent ultrasound of Hoeppner's fetus, showing hair, and a photo of her one-year-old son. Hoeppner wanted to regain custody of him from the foster home where he lives.

Where is your conscience, Canada?

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Update: It appears that this bill may get more support from the grass roots than politicians realize. The Winnipeg Sun's (albeit unscientific) poll on Jan. 2 shows 87% in favour of a murderer also being charged with the death of the unborn child.

Note to Canadian MP's - Please listen to your constituents.

H/T Hunter in comments.

Hodgepodge of updates and links - Updated many times

I'm trying hard to get away from the computer for a while, but it just won't let me...

Anyway, here is an assortment of links which I hope you find interesting. I often post these types of things for future reference. Blogger can be a useful tool for research with its search functions.


Threat to Freedom of Speech in Canada:
SDA - Macleans Magazine: A Case Study of Media-Propagated Islamophobia. Excellent comment by one of Kate's U.S. readers:

As an American, I cannot believe what is going on in your country concerning that disgusting (and clearly dangerous) "Human Rights Commission" of yours. When criticism of government policy can be penalized as "hate speech", you are no longer sliding down a slippery slope. Rather, you are in the muck. I will never again regret the appearance of flag burners in my country. I may disagree with them, at times to the point of fury, but I will regard their presence as a blessed sign that free speech is alive and well in America.
Posted by: Robert Pujat at December 10, 2007 3:57 PM

Tobacco Tax Protest:
LFP - Farmers to give Natives tobacco. Big tax loss for government.

The convoy would be illegal. Special permits are required to transport tobacco from Delhi to Caledonia. It is also illegal to transact tobacco outside the auction exchange in Delhi...

Will the OPP uphold the law?
Sex offender registry funds diverted, Tories say. (OPP diverted funds...)

Runciman suggested the OPP diverted some of the money for the sex offender registry to pay for policing the nearly two-year aboriginal occupation of a disputed housing development in Caledonia.

Isn't that great?
Sun - Province failing Christopher.


Paying homage to Mother Earth:
Celestial Junk - Ecophobia: Taking Advantage of NHL Hammer-heads.
FLICK OFF, eh?

Making lots of green: A convenient £50m for Green Gore (Times, courtesy of National Newswatch). Also see Australia 'stalling Bali Talks'. Wow!! Wasn't Rudd supposed to be the Environmentalist's messiah or something?

Highly recommended: Angelo Persichilli - Dion's Polluted Reputation.

Anyone got some darts? Suzuki as a guest columnist for the Star - Could there be a worse combination?

Lorne Gunter - Harper right to oppose Bali proposals.

Lorrie Goldstein - New Kyoto must include U.S., China.



Justice:
Big Blue Wave - The Unborn Victims of Crime Bill: It's a go!
Thursday, Dec. 13 - Second Reading scheduled (first time debated)

Scantygate:
National Post - The NDP's Nosey Nanny. BTW, isn't there a screen of some kind that you can buy for a laptop so personal information can't be seen at an angle by straying eyes?

Update: Dr. Roy says yes!!! Memo to James Moore - Put this on your Christmas list!!!

Steve Janke has a video for Irene Mathyssen.

Dr. Roy found the link to Irene's imaginary diary!

What would Irene say about this??? (H/T Mary T in comments) - Don't look, James!!!

Times Colonist - Sleazy NDP porn allegation dishonours all MP's.


More grievances from the Eternally Offended:
David Warren - Suing for Silence.


Urban Funding:
Record - Lack of transit link to Toronto an 'embarrassment', Cannon says and Minister blames cities, province for bogged-down transportation.

O.K. Premier. C'est maintenant votre tour.


Health care Accessibility:
Michael Coren - Two-Tier Trauma

Ottawa Sun - New funding trims abortion wait times. "Now, new funding has cut the wait time to terminate a pregnancy to about a week"... Well, at least Smitherman has his priorities straight, right?


Potential Dion Replacements:
Maybe Chretien should try again? (Don't it always seem to go, you don't know whatcha got til it's gone...)





More to come...

Protecting the right to choose - for ALL women

Let's hope Ken Epp has a bit more success than Leon Benoit getting some legislation through to protect Unborn Victims of Crime and their mothers who have chosen to follow through with the pregnancy.

I think there is a lot of grassroots support out there for this bill. Ironically, it was the Conservative government itself that squashed Benoit's efforts. Perhaps it was afraid of a pro-choice backlash, but I firmly believe this is not a mutually exclusive initiative. With the right wording, I think the law can protect a woman's right to choose whether she decides to abort her pregnancy or not. If she chooses to give birth to her baby and someone then commits an act of violence to destroy her unborn child, there should be a punishment for that.

Whatever your political stripes, please contact your MP and let him or her know that you support Bill C-484 (Unborn Victim of Crimes Act).

It's the least we can do for these grieving families.

They deserve closure.

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Background: Check out Suzanne's post - Margaret Somerville: Defending fetal homicide laws. There are great links to previous arguments both pro & con.

Update: Red Tory has a problem with the bill.

Why am I not surprised?

Upperdate: Red actually makes a good point. *Shudder*

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Unambig - In the case of fetal rights and interference.

Nexus - I just love it when he gets all dishonest like that...

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Lifesite: "...some of the families of women who were victims of deadly violent crime while pregnant are urging Canadians to immediately contact their Members of Parliament to urge them to support the Unborn Victims of Crime Act - Bill C-484."

Saturday Update: Rootleweb - Unborn Victims of Crime Act.

Stand your Ground - Unborn Victims of Crime Bill to be Reintroduced.


On the website is a pic of a fetus and a toddler, with the following motto:

"A future child? NO! It's a CHILD with a FUTURE!"

Canada needs an Unborn Victims of Crime law

Excellent essay in today's National Post by Dr. Margaret Somerville - New Life Matters.

The topic of pregnant women and their unborn babies being murdered is not going to go away. In Canada, however, we only recognize the murder of the mother in a legal sense. Dr. Somerville is challenging this concept along moral and ethical lines.

She cites statistics showing that a majority of Canadians support some kind of legal protection for the unborn:

In short, many Canadians' moral intuition is that "there ought to be a law" -- or laws -- protecting fetuses from some harms, although we don't all agree on what those laws should be, especially in the context of abortion. Presently in Canada, there is no express abortion law.

So given that the majority of Canadians feel that there should be some type of protection, but there is also the fear that abortion 'rights' may compromised.

Somerville delineates the ethical dilemma here:

But willful blindness is not an ethical approach to dealing with abortion.

Seeing the fetus as an unborn victim of crime strips away the medical cloak that abortion places on the taking of its life, a cloak that dulls our moral intuition as to what is involved. It causes us to see the fetus as what it is, an early human life. Those who support abortion must be able to square that fact with their belief that abortion is ethical in certain circumstances.

Regarding abortion, she suggests that at the very least we need to ensure that women who choose to have an abortion do so with eyes wide open as to the pain that could be inflicted upon the unborn:

A "Fetal Pain Awareness Act," similar to those some American states have enacted, could require a physician to inform the woman, before performing an abortion, that scientific evidence suggests that after 20 weeks gestation the fetus can feel pain. Furthermore, she would have to be offered anaesthesia for the fetus, which it would be her choice to take or decline. This type of law would not prohibit abortion; rather, its goal is to try to prevent the fetus from dying in excruciating pain. After all, even jurisdictions that allow capital punishment prohibit certain forms of it on the grounds that they are cruel. Likewise, we have criminal laws that protect animals from brutal treatment.

Does this seem reasonable? Why wouldn't we want to offer a woman the opportunity to terminate her child in a somewhat more humane manner?


Oh, I know. If we can't see it, then it can't feel pain, right?

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Wednesday Update: Two differing points of view in Post letters today, but they still seem to both agree that we need some kind of law.

Claudia Batista, assistant professor at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil argues that human life starts at conception.


Andrea Skorenki, OB/GYN resident, University of Alberta, Edmonton states that "...As a society we need to find a way to protect unborn fetuses after viability, but also to maintain a woman's right to decide what happens to her own body."


Suzanne has a blogburst going relating to a petition for the Holy Father to come to Quebec City in 2008. Perhaps we need some divine inspiration about how to handle this problem.

One murder charge or two?

Interesting program tonight on CTV's The Verdict.

The question was surrounding murders of pregnant women, and whether there should be two murder charges or one.

Most of the arguments on both sides were nothing new, but I did catch one intriguing point that the opponents of the two-charge option were trying to advance - that there is no gain in making the extra murder charge because in Canada just one life sentence is served for first-degree murders, or something along that line (if I've got that wrong, please correct me).

Anyway, the other side made the point that if a woman and her already born child were both murdered, then there would be two murder charges; so what's the difference?

The website should be updated soon with the new episode. Definitely worth the time to watch what continues to be a very emotional and complex issue.

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Update: Great article here by Father Raymond J. De Souza - There's no justice in silence (Post Oct. 25):

...The desire to maintain our permissive abortion regime should not prevent the criminal law from addressing the reality of crimes against pregnant women. A crime against an expectant mother is something different -- there is real trauma to the mother, if she survives the violence, resulting from the injury or death to her child -- to say nothing of the child. The Roxanne Fernando case makes it all the more clear; without the child, there would have been no crime. The law should not have to pretend otherwise.

Excellent point.