While our province’s oil and gas sector may be celebrating the recent election result, other groups of Albertans are less pleased – especially women.
In the lead-up to the election, polls indicated that while the United Conservative Party (UCP) was on track to win a majority, the party fared – according to Macleans – “disproportionately poorly” with Alberta’s women. Looking closer at those results, it’s clear where that disparity comes from: women respondents were more likely to place a higher value on social services like education and health.
For women, health is of particular concern. CBC reported May 3, anti-abortion group The Wilberforce Project, previously Alberta Pro-Life, had backed a number of UCP candidates who were ultimately elected as MLAs – and now intends to work with the UCP government to enact some of its policies into legislature.
Although Alberta’s newly-elected Premier Jason Kenney told CBC in 2016 he has “never championed, limited or eliminating abortion,” Global News reported he did support a motion in 2012 to “set up a committee to study whether a fetus is a human being before the moment of birth.” And just last year, rather than vote on a bill to protect abortion clinic staff and patients from harassment, UCP MLAs opted to walk out of the chamber – even after acknowledging the issue was a concern for many Albertan women.
Across the United States, governments seeking to restrict access to abortion have begun implementing what they call “heartbeat bills” – legislation that prohibits abortion after a heartbeat has been detected in an embryo. This typically occurs five to six weeks into a woman’s pregnancy, often before she even knows she’s pregnant.
According to a study conducted in April by Planned Parenthood and the Guttmacher Institute, more than 250 bills restricting access to abortion have been introduced in 28 American states so far in 2019, and actually signed into law in four. And it isn’t stopping at abortion – a bill introduced this month in Ohio seeks to ban “drugs or devices used to prevent the implantation of a fertilized ovum,” which could potentially include birth control pills or IUDs.
Kenney has been open about his own religious beliefs and socially-conservative positions, and that’s fine – no one should force anyone to get an abortion or use birth control if that’s not in line with their moral convictions. But it becomes an issue when lawmakers begin forcing those beliefs and positions on the rest of us through legislation like the heartbeat bill.
Women are human beings, not life-support systems. We have the right to bodily autonomy. And Canada has always been a champion of human rights – even in Margaret Atwood’s cautionary dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Canada was portrayed as a safe destination for American refugees fleeing the oppressive conservatism of Gilead.
I’d really like to see it stay that way.
