Once again, abortion activists are ramping up attempts to have the provincial government of New Brunswick fund a private abortion clinic to ensure it doesn’t go out of business—and they’ve got plenty of politicians willing to help. From Global News:
On Tuesday, 36 senators from across Canada signed a call for access to reproductive rights in New Brunswick after Premier Blaine Higgs said funding Clinic 554 would be a “slippery slope.”
Fredericton’s Clinic 554, which serves as an abortion clinic, a family practice and a resource for LGBTQ2+ patients across the province, is set to close at the end of the month as a result of the lack of funding.
“The closing of Clinic 554 would impair access to hard-won, Charter-protected rights,” the senators said…Higgs has also received criticism from the federal government on the Canada Health Act.
Ottawa had actually reduced the Canada Health Transfer to New Brunswick by $140,216, as a result of patient charges for abortion services provided outside of hospitals in 2017. On Monday, Higgs maintained that he will not be funding Clinic 554, or changing abortion-related regulation. He said funding services in a private clinic is “not what we value as a society. … So it is a slippery slope and if you do it for one service, where does it stop?”
So far, Blaine Higgs is holding strong.
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CTV is reporting that even Fredericton’s poet laureate got involved in the abortion fray:
Fredericton city council is considering ending the custom of opening public meetings with a poem after the city’s poet laureate read lyrical verses about abortion during a meeting Monday night. Poet laureate Jenna Lyn Albert triggered the controversy when she read, “Those Who Need to Hear This Won’t Listen,” a poem about a personal experience with abortion written by Ottawa-based writer Conyer Clayton.
Some councillors said the poem was overly political and inappropriate, others said it reflected the mood among residents and was timely given the expected closure of one of the province’s few abortion providers. “I’m terribly concerned that we are now politicizing poems,” Coun. Dan Keenan said during Monday’s meeting. “I completely agree with freedom of speech and the right for people to say what they want to say but that was never the intention for this forum.”
Keenan said he felt the council should reconsider whether its meetings should begin with a poem, lamenting how the custom has become a form of “political activism.” Councillors said Monday the city’s governance committee will look into whether it should end the custom. Albert said she picked the poem because she felt it was timely ahead of Clinic 554’s planned closure at the end of the month, which would leave N.B. residents with only three hospital-based options to access abortion services.
Here’s an excerpt from the poem that was read, featuring a description by Conyer Clayton of her own abortion:
Those who need to hear this won’t listen.
The small white pill melted
slowly on my tongue.
It softened
my cervix, but hardened
my will. I won’t stay
married to my mistakes,
a curdling
thing that needed to live
so I could realize
what needed to die.
My life
would be worse
if I hadn’t done it.
The cord that bound us
untearable, thick-fleshed.
Are you sure?
I cried.
A procedural pinch
deep in my belly.
That procedural pinch was the physical destruction of a human being in the womb. But that, in Canada, is the one part of the abortion debate that you are not allowed to discuss. Those tiny, vulnerable, marginalized human beings are cut out of the discussion just like they are suctioned out of the womb.
