, 05.10.2019 12:26 PM

KINSELLACAST 63: Norman scandal, choice, and get your laws off her body!


  1. Jack B says:

    Let me blow this legal argument out of the water. The prime overarching right in society is to protect those who are the most vulnerable and can not speak for themselves. Those are the unborn who are now viable at 26 weeks and that timeframe is shortening ever decade.

    If women are to have the only choice and the unborn have none, then society steps in. There is very little reason to have an abortion in this day and age. Birth control is practically free, so is the morning after pill. Ultrasounds and DNA test can detect abnormalities at 10 weeks.

    And if anyone thinks of going the US Democrat late term outside the womb abortion argument, expect a populist backlash.

    • Jack,

      Problem is that society is not supposed to have a universally convincing single position — that means no bragging rights for pro-life or pro-choice.

      Your societal rights are not necessarily mine — and vice versa. So how’s that?

    • Abortion is a necessary evil so there’s no debate folks at least not in an advanced democracy. Anyone who says you can’t have it both ways was born pre-internet. This is what all the cool kids at LSE, Oxford and Harvard are saying: By the mid-21st century there will be legal tiers based on your specific agreement with the state. arbitrage opportunities like selling your GST free cigarettes, notwithstanding this is a pillar of democracies upgrade…

      For example, abortion:
      1) we accept that those women opt out of the right to an abortion AND then HAVE an abortion have to pay a fine to have that hypocritical abortion (it’s cathartic after all!) and tie their previously determined opt out to their OHIP card, like organ donors AND while all tax revenue is fungible, opt out-ers tax rev does not go into supporting abortions (the anti-ab-pool)*

      2) we also accept that all women are opted into the right to an abortion and are supported with infrastructure to have said abortion covered by the vast pool of tax revenue under OHIP, no questions asked, as a right they are already opted into.

      It’s no religious person’s place to impose their values on a multi-faith multi-tiered legal system but rather it is an agreement we make as individuals with the state.

      Men cannot be in the opt out pool because they cannot physically have an abortion but can append their inadmissible preference to the not in my name abortion-card and maybe that reflects funding. Bureaucrats distribute abortion funding into high anti-an areas to ensure the preferences are supported.

      *this Would create a perverse incentive to convert catholic high school girls to the opt-out but the abortion opt-out card has to be signed by the person and is binding for 5 years and tied to OHIP. Let’s see how many people want to restrict the right in each for channeling their tax away from abortion; Mic drop!

      I’ll open it up to questions now…

      • Samantha Banks-Quills says:


        But then moral people can harass everyone to get an abortion card. It would lead to a lot of abortion cards littering campuses.

        And I’m guessing that even if you are against abortion for others, that woman will still want to have the right to choose for themselves. Hypocrites.

        • Samantha Banks Quills says:

          Also, all government funds are in one big pool. So even if the anti-abortion movement was strengthened by their ability to get female tax payers to personally reject the right to an abortion and let’s say they get 50% of the female population which is only 25% of the total population, the government would still have 75% of tax payer revenue to direct into the 100k abortion cases per year and generate modest revenue from the rare abortion card holder…

          I get the point that binary thinking is pre-internet mindset but the debate is about wanting 100% or 0% funding and most people in the debate are pre-internet.

          Also the government is not sophisticated enough to actually to deliver a split system.

  2. Joseph Taylor says:

    How can it be her body if it has it’s own unique DNA? At least be intellectually honest enough to acknowledge that it’s a tiny human being but you believe it’s rights are subordinate to that of the mother. Claiming an unborn child is a woman’s body is a great sound byte but it’s scientifically as credible as climate science denial at this point.

    • Walter says:

      The unborn child or fetus is just a tumor in the woman body. The day of delivery, the stork arrives and swaps out the tumor for an actual human.
      The science is settled – 97% agree that this is how it works.

    • Fred from BC says:

      For sure. I’ve always been fascinated by the peculiar…umm… intellectual ‘disconnect’ (yeah, let’s go with that) that the left seems to be able to employ, at will, on certain subjects.

      Human-caused climate change: believe the science.

      Abortion\gender identity: don’t believe the science.

  3. Gilbert says:

    If a woman can do what she wants with her body, then must we legalize indecent exposure, prostitution and suicide?

  4. Jack B says:

    And the argument gets more dicey. If a womans rights are paramount to all other considerations, then does she have the right to terminate another female life?

    This whole argument is short sighted navel gazing for legal policy wonks. It negates all other arguments. Your personal rights don’t trump societies. The only window for an abortion is from conception to w26 or so. So lets unpack that. Your have contraception, the morning pill works up to 6-8 weeks, DNA tests start at 10w and the fetus is viable in ICU at 26 weeks so we know that is a hard date when life can survive. Anything after that is murder. If a woman chooses to have an abortion at those stages she should have to have her tubes tied during the procedure because she is not mentally stable enough to be a parent.

    Sorry, but sometimes the good of society has to come into play and killing our youngest people is the antithesis of what a compassionate society should be. Plus there are thousands of people wanting to adopt newborns.

  5. Fred from BC says:

    Wow…some really good, thoughtful arguments here.

    Why can’t our politicians have a discussion like this?

  6. Samantha Banks-Quills says:


    Yes, a woman can terminate an umbilical cord attached baby regardless of the sex of that baby. And yes, thousands of people want to adopt newborns, but the demand would not be able to keep up with supply if abortion was illegal! Look up Romania in the 1980s, New York city crime rates in the 1990s dropped in part because of Roe V Wade. Unwanted children are the most difficult to raise.

    The person who has to have the baby decides NOT some abstract society, nor Christian groups, nor what is deemed moral. The authority resides in the uterus owner and the support and financing must be in place to provide that.

    A baby is definitely alive at insemination but lots can happen between week 1 and week +40. In particular, the baby might be aborted at any point on that journey because that baby is a woman’s property, unless that woman is against abortion in which carry to term and give up for adoption.

    This is settled.

    • Pedant says:

      But it’s not settled because the Left continues to push the envelope, now coming close to demanding abortion rights be extended to the post-birth period. See: Virginia.

    • Gord Tulk says:

      Do please cite your evidence of the crime rate declining being due to roe v wade.

      • Walter says:

        If crime rate declined due to more abortions in the 1990’s, why was it so low in the 1950’s and 60’s when there was no abortion, and then increased in the 70’s when there was no legal abortion (although it was more common than in the 50’s and 60’s)?

        • Samantha Banks Quills says:

          In social science, causality is notoriously difficult to ‘prove’ which is why both sides can win an abortion debate by disputing the strength of the statistical correlation, lots of intervening variables but yes there is a compelling case that Roe V Wade reduces crime:

          (Independent variables) UNWANTED children -> MORE LIKELY to commit crimes (dependent variable)

          Unwanted children are MORE LIKELY to be neglected, not supported (financial/emotional) which is HIGHLY correlated with joining organizations (gangs etc) where they do feel supported.

          It doesn’t mean abortion is right or wrong. It’s the individual mother’s choice.

          This is known as the Donnohue-Levitt hypothesis. http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/

        • Samantha Banks Quills says:


          So this an interesting point; assuming your crime statistics are generally correct ( ie crime in the 1950s was low) there are many contributing factors to crime rate other than the absence or presence of abortion rights.

          Such as economic development and GDP growth post ww2 REDUCES the benefit of committing a crime and INCREASES the benefit of having an honest job.

          The economy slowed down in the 1970s.

          An absence of a variable like abortions is only part of what reduces crime statistically. There is a time lag of 20 years since it takes that long for an unwanted baby to turn to serious crime. Such a cutesy mobster. This is not to say every unwanted baby turns to crime, it’s just more likely if you look at a given population on a bell curve.

          But I’ll add some crazy batshit truth bombs: There were also over 45k/400k young men killed from Canada / US between 1939-1945. So of that pool, some of those kids MORE LIKELY to take risks and perhaps some of those brave lost soldiers were born unwanted with no family support back home and sadly never returned to Canada to create the crimes that they were destined to commit.

          Meanwhile the Canadian government gave every surviving soldier a chance at a degree or a cash leg up in a great economy which REDUCES the unwanted ness of a person whose mom’s would have preferred to have had abortion rights in the 1930s but their voices were not recognized by the state.

  7. Pedant says:

    The Left is moving rapidly towards demanding a grace period following birth during which the baby can be killed. This is the logical next step since it is already legal to abort a “fetus” one day before birth because genetic testing shows the baby has brown eyes instead of blue.

  8. Ronald O'Dowd says:

    All of this is not coincidentially a subset of Charter sections 15 and 28 rights. In my neck of the woods, the Quebec Charter also affirms how men and women are at least theoretically equal. Funny how this province views the SCOC Lola decision as not incompatible with those explicitly enshrined rights. Quebec remains the last juridiction post-1980s where common-law couples do not have the same legal rights and legislative benefits as legally martied couples. That cognitive dissonance is a true reflection of Quebec society.

    Transpose that to the abortion debate, which is not a debate about personhood or abortion cut-offs. Rather, it’s simply an extension of an argument that men somehow have a legal or civil right to dictate to women. It’s genuinely all about who controls a woman’s life, her or an unwelcome non-birth capable third party.

  9. Jack B says:

    Women do not have unfettered personal choice in this matter because the costs and impacts of this policy are socialized meaning we all pay for someone’s perceived choice. Those costs include health costs both physical and emotional at the time of the procedure and well after it as well.

    I don’t advocate making it illegal because there are circumstances for it. But it should not be used as birth control and that’s what is happening. It was supposed to be rare. 50M abortions a year world wide doesn’t sound rare to me.

    The choice is to be made before intercourse happens. Get some protection. The pill costs just pennies a day. With personal choice comes personal responsibility.

  10. CYU9 says:

    It seems obvious that having, or not having, a child is entirely a woman’s choice. What’s not so obvious is why a man should have to pay support for a child that he never wanted. Shouldn’t that also be a choice?

    • Ronald O'Dowd says:


      Don’t men who don’t want children get vasectomies or wear condoms to reduce pregnancy risk?

    • Fred from BC says:

      I had a friend get into that situation: girlfriend swore she was on the pill, told her friends in private that she went off them to get pregnant and force him to marry her. He left her immediately but was stuck paying child support for years afterward…

      • CYU9 says:

        I’ll probably always feel that a man should want to provide for his children. But if having, or not having, a child is solely a woman’s choice, aren’t men being absolved of paternal responsibility? It sure seems like it, and I know enough women that agree…

        • Fred from BC says:

          You’d think that, logically…but the law still refuses to give men a break when something like that happens. Seems like the very definition of a ‘double standard’ to me.

          • CYU9 says:

            I guess law makers can always argue that the welfare of a child overrides any want of logical consistency. That and the fact that men can be resentful of be required to support other men’s children through their taxes.

            But if a woman is capable of providing for a child’s welfare on her own, both of those arguments lose their merit. Yet a man can still be obligated to pay support. It’s a shitty deal.

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