NDP challenges Conservative attempt to reopen abortion file

Shit. 

I wonder if this has anything to do with Brad Trost opening his mouth again:

http://www.thestar.com/article/1124432--conservative-mp-brad-trost-says-...

As an aside, I don't know where the reporter gets the "400-year-old definition" from.  After all, it was less than 100 years ago that women were not considered human beings in Canada.

Unionist wrote:

Hey Spector, serious question: Do you know (or how would one figure out) when the definition in Section 223 was first enacted?

It's as old as the Canadian Criminal Code itself, which was enacted in 1892, and codified much of existing British law. The original text read:

Quote:

219. A child becomes a human being within the meaning of this Act when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother, whether it has breathed or not, whether it has an independent circulation or not, and whether the navel string is severed or not. The killing of such child is homicide when it dies in consequence of injuries received before, during or after birth.

It has been reworded since then, but the meaning remains unchanged.

[url=http://www.archive.org/details/criminalcodevic00canagoog]Source[/url]

Accorrding to last night's The National there is another private members bill on the way - this one to do with gender selection. Great - they get to be anti-choice and racist at the same time now.

I think Harper is actually enjoying this. I have this image of him holding a mad dog on a tight leash - demonstrating that he has the power to let it go if he wants to. To someone who isn't paying attention he looks like the reasonable one.

This could go under media as well as it is also a complaint about crappy journalism.

Barbara Kay wrote a vile piece on sex selective abortion. She is entitled to her biased, anti-women, opinion. However, her article is misleading and manipulative as well. In that article she cites an Environics poll that found 92% of Canadians were against sex-selective abortions being legal. Frames those who oppose limiting a woman's right to chose as being a radical 8% fringe. I was immediately suspicious. I am sure the number who don't like sex selective abortions is extremely high but that the number who want it to be illegal would not be so high-- a large number of people even in today's right wing Harperland respect that women have absolute choice and do not have to explain themselves as to their reasons. I looked up the poll as I knew something was wrong with it.

Well, the survey was commissioned by the anti-choice group Life Canada.

The questions were leading according to the poll documentation. Before being able to answer, market researchers would tell people when the heart would start beating etc. This information is not just information that would help people answer the poll-- it would also help those who recognized that this was an anti-choice push-poll know when to hang up if they were not themselves anti-choice. I know enough about polling having worked in it myself to know that you can set up a poll to go the way you want by turning off respondents who might otherwise give you a different opinion than the one you are looking for. The poll is clearly one of those -- designed to deliver a specific result. Most people I know would have hung up on the first question while those who are anti choice would have done the entire thing creating the desired result. When you consider that, the poll's results are not all that good for the anti choice side. Still they created a poll that then lifted out of context -- unethically -- then becomes a leading position to place in an article as Barbara Kay did.

There are important things here that I want to point out: This is a textbook case of mass manipulation. The poll itself is not so bad as it is so clearly biased in the documentation that those reading it would not be fooled but the unethical reporting omits all of that. That is important to document. Of course the attack on women's rights is always essential to document as I do here. Since that is the more important of the two I placed my post here rather than under media. Below you will find my post put below Kay's article:

You talk about the poll from 2011. The poll told respondents, before they answered, reasons to make sex selective abortions illegal. It did not tell them the legal implications of limiting a woman's choice or how those limits can be extended using the logic of no longer respecting a woman's absolute control of her body. It did not tell them that if women were sufficiently empowered they would not choose to abort girls. It did not tell them that women could be forced into explaining themselves as a condition of having an abortion if they no longer had absolute choice or what that explanation process and potential legal sanctions could be. It presented a one-sided argument. But don't take my word for it read the poll documentation here: http://www.lifenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/lifecanada2.pdf

Environics being a reputable polling company was careful in the documentation to include all that. You as a journalist unfortunately did not. You have a responsibility to report it when your information comes from a source that is biased and is created or collected in a biased way.

The poll was paid for and had questions designed by Life Canada an anti-choice lobby group. Environics in their report disclosed that fact: "The questions were designed by senior Environics researchers in conjunction with representatives from LifeCanada." When you quoted that poll, as a journalist, ethically, you should have included that information as well.