by Jonathon Van Maren
While no one generally accuses Heather Mallick of anything resembling nuance, her most recent screed, which rails against Member of Parliament Mark Warawa’s recent motion to condemn sex-selective abortion targeting females, is particularly revealing and mean-spirited.
She first scoffs at the idea that Motion 408, which asks that “the House condemn discrimination against females occurring through sex-selective pregnancy termination.”
“It’s as though Conservatives think grown women and cell clumps are members of the same voting bloc,” she writes with scientifically illiterate annoyance, “as though they have the same interests, and the same IQ.” A revealing statement—besides Ms. Mallick’s lack of knowledge—or at least acknowledgement—of embryology, her argument seems to be that since “baby women” are not members of the same voting bloc (in that they can’t vote) or have the same interests (“living” would probably be among them), these female fetuses obviously do not have her IQ.
Does one’s IQ dictate one’s value? According to Ms. Mallick, yes it does. She goes on to say that Britain’s current health minister, Jeremy Hunt, wants to restrict abortion to twelve weeks. This constitutes a grave problem–according to Mallick: “The tests for conditions like Down syndrome cannot be done before 12 weeks. Women will be rushed into abortions, or miss the deadline, or get a back-street abortion or give birth to a severely damaged child neither they nor their partner were warned about.”
Where do I start? Ms. Mallick opposes restrictions on abortion because apparently, a few Down syndrome babies, already being aborted at an astronomical rate, might make it past the carefully watching eye of the eugenicist. Women will barely have time to dispense with these imperfect dullards if abortion on demand is even slightly curbed. Is anyone else repulsed by the inherent ableism in the insinuation that parents would be so appalled by what Ms. Mallick refers to as a “severely damaged child” that they would wish they had dispensed with the child earlier in his or her life?
Ms. Mallick continues on in this vein, stating that ultrasounds are only necessary if women can have abortions (this will come as quite the shock to millions of parents who see a child on their scan, not a target) and insinuates that sex-selective abortions happen because these parents realize how hard life is for girls. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the feminism of Canada’s abortion cabal—allow parents to abort female fetuses because, as Ms. Mallick puts it, “the lives of girls are so awful.”
I trust that Canadians reject the idea that we want to live in this dystopia that Ms. Mallick delineates for us, a country where Down syndrome children are not worthy of life and where sex-selective abortions can be viewed as feminist mercy killings. We deserve better.