April 2008
The
abortion debate that never happened at York University last week was, by all
accounts, a typical campus affair. The small room in the student centre had been
dutifully booked, the fliers stamped for approval, and the head of the York
Debating Society was ready to moderate. In these respects, it was virtually
identical to an upcoming debate in the same building on the existence of God.
But, as is increasingly common at Canadian universities, one student politician
saw potential for offence and brought the whole thing to an abrupt end.
“This debate, over whether or not women should be able to have an abortion, is
not acceptable in the student centre,” said Kelly Holloway, president of the
York University Graduate Students Association and vice-chairwoman of the student
centre.
From the posters, she had recognized the anti-abortion speaker — Jose Ruba of
the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform in Calgary — and knew that his
strategy is to show gruesome photos of aborted fetuses (which she believes to be
faked), and to make gross comparisons to genocide and the Holocaust.
And
so Ms. Holloway hastily convened four members of the centre’s executive for a
vote, and the debate was officially nixed, to the dismay of the 50 or so
students who showed up.
“It
would be equivalent to having a debate over whether or not you can beat your
wife,” Ms. Holloway said.”People in this country have had the debate over
abortion. The Supreme Court made a decision, and that’s good enough for me…. I
think we should accept that the debate is over.”
This kind of thinking, and the bureaucratic actions it motivates, is evident in
abortion discussions around the country but especially on campuses, where
student pro-life groups have been marginalized — even voted out of existence —
by the unilateral and often capricious decisions of their student leaders.
The
situation has become so frustrating that these groups have started
appealing off-campus to human rights boards, which are typically unfriendly to
social conservatives.
This January, for example, a pro-life group at Lakehead University decided to
appeal to the Ontario Human Rights Commission after the student government
banned it from handing out leaflets, using the school’s name, or engaging in any
“unsolicited conversations.” By coincidence, Mr. Ruba is at Lakehead today to
conduct a similar debate, though he fears it, too, will be cancelled.”I have
this tendency to get pro-life clubs attacked or cancelled after debating,” he
said.
Also in January, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal delivered verdicts
on two college pro-life groups that had been denied student club status.
Incredibly, one lost and the other won. And last month at the University of
Toronto’s law school, a day-long symposium to mark the 20th anniversary of the
Morgentaler decision, attended by the 84-year-old Dr. Henry Morgentaler himself,
did not include a single speaker who dissented from the dominant view of
abortion as an emancipatory boon for women.
Abortion, obviously, does not lend itself to breezy debate. Indeed, “life” and
“choice” appear to be irreconcilable opposites.
But
Ms. Holloway’s claim that abortion should be completely undebatable does not sit
well among the students she represents.
“The analogy to beating your wife simply doesn’t hold, because no one beats
their wife and then makes a moral argument about why they should do it,” said
Michael Payton, a York student of cognitive science and philosophy and a member
of a student group Freethinkers, Skeptics and Atheists, who was slated to argue
the pro-choice side against Mr. Ruba.
Mr.
Payton said he knew that Mr. Ruba’s organization has “a bad history of being
deceptive” and using manipulative propaganda, especially gruesome videos of
abortions, but “videos and pictures are not arguments, and at the end of the
day, if I can speak after him and show that it’s a fallacious argument to show
pictures instead of actual philosophy, actual science, then it wouldn’t matter
if he wasted everyone’s time with 20 minutes of horrific videos, because
he’s not making an argument.
“If
we don’t let people know the reasons why we have abortion legalized in Canada,
and the ethical theory behind it, then we risk losing it. I think [Ms. Holloway]
had every good intention, but I think she was dead wrong [to cancel],” Mr.
Payton said.”You don’t get anywhere by simply ignoring the debate that happens
in the hearts and minds of everyone at some point or another.”
In
an interview yesterday, Ms. Holloway said that neither Mr. Payton, nor Amir
Mohareb, the scheduled moderator and president of the York Debating Society,
knew very much about Mr. Ruba and his positions, and that their ignorance made
her intervention necessary.
But
both said they were well-informed, and Mr. Mohareb said he had approached the
student government to inform them of the event and the possible controversy. In
discussions with Mr. Ruba, Mr. Mohareb also established ground rules about the
format of the debate and especially the use of images, which were to be prefaced
with a warning. Video was not allowed, he said.
Ms.
Holloway said there is no way to appeal her decision to cancel the debate, but
every indication is that she now has a fight on her hands, one that threatens to
spill beyond the borders of the student centre. After the cancellation on
Thursday afternoon, Mr. Mohareb said he went to all levels of student government
to try to broker a compromise.
“I
made it quite clear that I’ll get rid of the images, and I’ll get rid of this
external speaker, and we’ll just have this debate on our own. I said we can
still have the debate, and either we’ll have a student debate the pro-life,
which wouldn’t be difficult to find, or we’ll just get rid of both groups [Mr.
Payton’s and Students for Bioethical Awareness, which invited Mr. Ruba], and we
as a debating society will just host the debate ourselves, between
ourselves, which we do all the time,” Mr. Mohareb said.
But
he was told that the topic itself is “out of line,” and that “debating abortion
would be as much of a violation as debating the Holocaust.”
He
said that he and the other members of the debating society were “wholly
unconvinced,” and so he asked for an official, written statement clarifying
which topics he is forbidden from debating. He was promised that one would be
delivered today.
“To
be completely neutral, it’s a little too soon to say that we are banned from
debating abortion on student space. However, it’s clear that a number of
executives of the student union feel that way, and I have made it quite clear
that if that’s how they feel, then the debating society would take this up
further,” Mr. Mohareb said.
National Post, March 4, 2008.
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