Looking at Canadian Twitter today, the day the US Supreme Court formally struck down Roe v. Wade, and, consequently, limitations on the power of state and federal governments to fine, incarcerate or kill women for ending their pregnancies, I see that we are awash in the subject on which I wrote my last post, post-politics.
Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister, and Jean Charest, the former Québec premier and no-hoper candidate for Leader of the Opposition were quick to their keyboards this morning with condemnatory words for the US Supreme Court and its latest egregious decision. Normally, when Trudeau and other Canadian progressives try to piggyback US news stories, like mass shootings, by staking-out popular positions with watchers of Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert, I just sigh and put it down to the post-political era in which we live.
It’s not like there is anything Canadians can do about American mass shootings or Floridian children being prohibited from sitting on library drag queens’ laps during school hours, or whatever the issue of the moment is. Canadian politicians sound off and Canadians who have given up on politics but still like striking a certain pose on American issues cheer them on.
But this is not the case when it comes to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It’s not a choice between Canadian opinion leaders either taking to Twitter to offer harsh words and witty banter to score meaningless points in progressive image curation or declining to do so. American women’s loss of their reproductive rights is actually something to which Canadian public policy not only can respond but to which we should respond.
When I first started listening to the news on a daily basis, I was about eleven years old and I listened to the big CBC Radio news programs that were produced at the zenith of state-sponsored Cold War liberal journalism. As It Happens, The World at Six and the extended 10:00pm news before Book Time were staples of my day. The struggle against Apartheid looms large in those memories of the mid-1980s, as does the terminal phase of the Cold War; rivaling that were the Liverpool Ferry stories.
Back in the mid-80s, Ireland was still a conservative theocratic state and the centrepiece of its claim to being a Catholic nation was its absolute zero tolerance for abortion. No matter how young a girl was, no matter who had inseminated her, no legal abortions were available in Ireland. While there were decent underground abortion doctors in Ireland, they faced stiff legal penalties if caught and were, consequently, hard to find, especially for young women who were not plugged into the underground feminist networks and trust-based referral chains that could connect them with reproductive healthcare.
Consequently, the most rational solution to the problem of an unwanted pregnancy was for young women to board the Dublin to Liverpool ferry and have English doctors terminate their pregnancies. Liverpool has long stood as a champion of human rights, all the way back to the eighteenth century when its courts began conferring legal personhood on escaped slaves from Virginia and Georgia. And, even during Thatcherite austerity, Liverpool doctors and hospitals stepped up to help these marginalized young women.
As a result, Ireland began prohibiting pregnant women from leaving the country until they had carried their foetus to term. Police began surveilling the Dublin ferry terminal, sometimes setting up checkpoints and they began greeting formerly pregnant young women returning from Liverpool by clapping them in irons.
Ever since I became transfixed by these stories of girls, some as young as I was back in the day, I have understood that abortion is, like so many other issues connected to women’s bodily autonomy, an international issue about which bordering countries absolutely do have a role to play.
Canadians have a choice today. We can either grandstand and virtue signal or our MPs can head into parliament and start passing laws that make the kind of material difference to American women that the judges and hospital workers of Liverpool made for Irish women in the 1980s.
First of all, we need to amend our refugee legislation. American women who are currently pregnant and wish to end their pregnancies and women who have terminated their pregnancies in defiance of state abortion bans should be accepted as refugees from sex-based discrimination and persecution. Will there be diplomatic consequences to reconfiguring our policies in a way that recognizes the existence of refugees from the USA? You bet. But apparently, we feel strongly about women’s rights; so maybe we should be willing to pay a price for trying to protect them.
Second, we can be the new Liverpool for women in border states like Idaho, where abortion is currently illegal and where the governor and GOP legislative majority are planning to append abortion to the murder statute, literally meaning that women who don’t have a good enough excuse for their miscarriage will end up on death row. Canada should be inviting American organizations that want to provide reproductive health services to set up in Canadian border cities. We should roll out the welcome mat.
Third, whether they are applying for refugee status or just staying for the day to get some outpatient medical treatment, we should be waving women of reproductive age across the border into Canada, including making ID requirement exceptions for women who have not been able to secure expedited passports.
Fourth, we should refuse to share information with federal and state American government agencies that attempt to prevent or track the migration of pregnant women with a view to stopping them getting reproductive healthcare outside their state of residence. Privacy rights are central to the abortion debate; after all, Roe v. Wade was not a court judgement about a medical procedure but about women’s right to privacy.
Canada could take some risks, show some courage and make a material difference in the lives of American women of childbearing age. And any MP from any party could introduce legislation to do what I have outlined tomorrow as a private members’ bill. We could be as courageous in our defense of reproductive choice as Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the mid-1980s. But I’m not going to be holding my breath.
