Woodworth's debate contributions exemplify what is wrong with his motion and why it will fail. Throughout, he uses the word "women" only once, ironically to note that women were previously not considered persons under Canadian law. My opening statement focused on the potential harms his motion would pose to the lives, health, and personhood of all pregnant women, but Woodworth could only offer a few weak and random criticisms that ignore women and fail to address my key points.
Woodworth accuses me of "conjuring up a host of concepts which are not found in the question being debated." But the fact that women cannot be found anywhere in his motion is precisely the problem -- the main "logical fallacy," as it were. He can't just erase women from the discussion as if they are mere containers for fetuses with no rights of their own. After all, a fetus cannot exist or thrive without a woman to sustain it.
When Canadian law treats a pregnant woman and her fetus as one person, it protects not just women's rights, but the welfare of fetuses. When a pregnant woman is safe and healthy, so is her fetus. It's that simple. Fetuses do not need their own legal protection because helping pregnant women helps fetuses. We need to ensure women have access to adequate nutrition, quality healthcare, family planning to help space pregnancies, assistance to escape poverty or domestic abuse (conditions that contribute to high-risk pregnancies), and basic human rights and equality. UNICEF notes that "educating and empowering women has direct benefits for the survival, health and development of their children."
In contrast, the typical results of fetal protection laws are higher rates of maternal mortality and morbidity, and child mortality. For example, when abortion is illegal, women will resort to unsafe abortion or suffer poor health due to repeated unwanted childbearing. Each year, 220,000 children worldwide are orphaned when their mothers die from unsafe abortion. When a pregnant woman dies from any cause, her existing children are 10 times more likely to die within the next two years. So if Canadians really want to protect fetuses, the only just and effective way is to safeguard women's rights and invest in their health and welfare.
Opinion polls might suggest that Canadians want laws on abortion, but polls on abortion are biased and unreliable, especially if they ask when fetuses should have protection under the law. Laws have no place in medicine, which is governed by policy, ethics codes, and medical discretion. Regardless, abortions after about 20 weeks are rare in Canada (less than 0.4% a year) and only available to women with serious fetal abnormalities, so it would be cruel to criminalize them.
Woodworth quotes Justice Bertha Wilson in the 1988 R. v Morgentaler ruling, who wanted Parliament to decide when the state's interest in protecting the fetus becomes compelling, but gave her own opinion "that it might fall somewhere in the second trimester."
Wilson was simply explaining that it's the role of Parliament to legislate, not the Supreme Court's. While it's true that Parliament could enact an abortion law, no government has wanted to touch the issue since 1990, when a Mulroney government bill failed to pass. Today, it's highly unlikely that any law restricting abortion or granting rights to fetuses would withstand constitutional scrutiny because Charter rights and case law have evolved to the point where the inherent conflict with women's rights is now very clear. In any case, Parliament has no "duty" to act on the issue.
As a cautionary tale, Woodworth quotes some academics who argue that it would be ethical to kill newborns because late-term fetuses and infants are equivalent and neither are "persons." But that position fails to recognize the fundamental difference between the two. A fetus is totally dependent on one particular woman for its survival, unlike a newborn that can be placed in the care of another. A pregnant woman has no such option with her fetus, which is why her rights must prevail. The primacy of women's rights fills the blind spot in Woodworth's question: "How can we possibly justify denying that such a child is in fact a human being at some point before the moment of complete birth?"
Woodworth asserts that: "...any law that denies fundamental rights without cogent evidence and sound principle is not legitimate." If he actually believes that legal precedents, women's human rights, and the proven danger of fetal protection laws to the health and lives of women and children, don't count as evidence or sound principles, he's prioritizing ideology over common sense.
Or perhaps he's hoping to have such things declared out of bounds for his Parliamentary committee, so it can focus solely on the biological development of the fetus. In that case, the committee just needs to read a few pages from an embryology textbook and we'll be done with this exercise in futility. Such evidence is simply not germane to the issue of fetal rights, since the rights of pregnant women must always take precedence.
I fully agree with Woodworth that "we should never accept that it is legitimate to ignore cogent evidence, or refuse to acknowledge any human being's fundamental rights, simply to satisfy some policy or ideology, on abortion or anything else." I just wish he would listen to his own advice.