Quebec's abortion clinics---is it okay to be substandard?

Andrea Mrozek and Rebecca Walberg have a blistering op ed in today's National Post. I hope it gets widely read as it deserves.

What appalls me is the original consciousness-raising that led to the feminist movement of the 1970s is vast disappearing into what strikes me as an anti-woman, downright misogynist disregard for our lives. You can hear it in the rap lyrics, see it on various progressive blogs (the ubiquitous c-word) and see it in public policy that ignores the health ramifications of abortion and is even willing to forego health standards for every other body part but female reproductive organs (or subsequent mental health).

Here's an excerpt from Mrozek and Walberg's essay. Please blog this, forward it, Facebook it. Get the word out:

Bill 34 in Quebec was an attempt to legislate the same standards for all out-patient medical clinics. The bill, it's worth noting, never mentioned abortion, but that didn't stop abortion activists from shifting into high-gear apoplexy. Those who purportedly stand for women's rights jumped to demand lower standards for their exclusively female patients. And on Aug. 17, they won. Quebec's beleaguered Health Minister Yves Bolduc retreated, and will now wait for the Quebec College of Physicians to create new guidelines.

Now Bolduc made it clear he's not pro-life. Bill 34 wasn't an end-run attempt to curtail access to abortions. That's a laughable idea in Quebec of all places, the province with the country's highest abortion rate. This was an attempt to apply uniform standards to all medical clinics. Who knew something so anodyne could cause such animus? But behind the hysteria lies the phenomenon known to pro-lifers everywhere as "the abortion distortion." (We first learned the term from Rachel MacNair, a pro-life feminist and psychologist.) The abortion distortion dictates that where abortion is mentioned, or even just implied as in this case, a double standard comes into play. Even where women's health is at stake.

The distortion happens when a perfectly valid study showing poor mental health effects for women after abortion is ignored, or worse still, torn apart as was done with the credible work of New Zealand psychologist David Fergusson. It happens when physical side effects post-abortion are kept under wraps, such as the credible link to subsequent pre-term deliveries after an abortion. It happens when pro-life women and men are summarily dismissed as "misogynists" in part because a liberal elite is fearful of losing the abortion-on-demand status quo.

And the abortion distortion happens when abortion clinics are exempt from the rules that apply to other medical clinics, as they now will be in Quebec. The abortion distortion is magnified when this is trumpeted as a victory for "women's rights."