by Allison Cross. May 9, 2013.
A Tory backbencher behind a mini-rebellion of government MPs last month made his long-awaited statement in the House of Commons on Thursday about his opposition to sex-selective abortion — without actually uttering the word abortion at all.
Instead, Mark Warawa, MP for Langley, B.C., framed his argument around his opposition to female gendercide and the way it discriminates against women and girls.
“Female gendercide is the systematic killing of women and girls, just because they’re girls,” Warawa said in a statement prior to question period.
“The UN says that over two hundred million girls are missing in the world right now because of the female genocide.”
Warawa referenced a 2012 study from the Canadian Medical Association, which noted sex-selective abortions have become more frequent as Canada receives more immigrants from eastern, patriarchal countries.
The Association went so far as to recommend that women not be told the sex of her fetus until it has reached 30 weeks.
Warawa called the discrimination “barbaric.”
“Mr. Speaker, the statement ‘it’s a girl’ shouldn’t be a death sentence,” he said.
Warawa’s latest bucking of the party line is unlikely to go unnoticed by the Conservative party hierarchy.
As Warawa made his statement in the Commons, thousands of people gathered on the lawn of Parliament Hill in Ottawa in what has become an annual ritual designed to raise the abortion issue at the national level.
Organizers of the March for Life protest accused Prime Minister Stephen Harper of shutting down any debate on abortion.
When Warawa tried to introduce a motion in Parliament condemning gendercide in December 2012, opponents claimed he was opening the door to debating abortion more generally. At committee, his motion was declared “non-votable.”
The Conservative party also blocked discussion of the motion by keeping Warawa’s name off a party list given to the Speaker of the House of Commons that determines which MPs may make statements.
This prompted a complaint to Speaker Andrew Scheer – backed by several other Conservatives – Harper was muzzling his backbenchers.
In late April, Scheer ruled that he would allow some MPs to speak even if they weren’t on the list provided by each party.
Rob Anders, a self-described pro-life Tory, said members of Parliament who have taken stands against abortion will face an uphill battle to retain party nominations going into the next general election in 2015.
And he said at the rally on Thursday that activists should recruit people to get involved in nomination meetings.
Source: National Post