Justin Trudeau, Naomi Kline on CBC
On last Sunday’s CBC Sunday Edition,
Michael Enright interviewed both Justin Trudeau and Naomi Kline, well known writer
and activist. Trudeau was interviewed first. He was strong on
preserving Canadian women’s right to safe, legal abortions.
Abortion is still a contentious subject and Trudeau didn’t flinch
in his decision that Federal Liberal MP’s, should they form the government,
must not vote against a women’s right to choose. I admire him for this.
Especially at a time when the US is losing ground on the issue, and even
imploding in some states. But Trudeau is weak when it comes to raising
taxes on the wealthy (he won’t). He isn’t that strong either, in my
opinion, on the environment (he promotes the Keystone XL pipeline). Naomi
Kline certainly has my vote on the environment as she points out that it is the
capitalist system that is killing the planet. But that leaves me with
disquiet. While Kline sees the redistribution of wealth as a must before
we can progress as humans, a socialist thinking I share, she doesn’t see women
as being pivotal in this transformation. At least she doesn’t say so.
In her interview, Naomi Kline was
careful to emphasize that she didn’t consider motherhood as being the impetus
for her own worry about the environments as she was three years into her latest
book “This Changes Everything” before her first child was born. I
agree that women don’t have to be mothers to be worried about the
environment. Women don’t have to be mothers to be feminists. But
there is a difference between women and men. Women’s brains and nervous
systems are wired differently from men’s brains in order to accommodate the
necessary reproductive work of building and nourishing infants’ bodies. This
biological difference influences the thinking and feelings of women whether
they ever actually have a baby or not. Because of this, I believe we will
never have the transformation into a higher human consciousness that
encompasses a “deep ecology” unless and until women demand it. So back to
Justin Trudeau.
Why does Trudeau’s polices of
insisting that Liberal MP’s always vote to protect women’s right to safe legal
abortions strike such a deep cord with me? Two reasons. Now at
eighty-six years old, I was having children back in an era when many desperate
women died from bungled amateur abortions. My own cousin bled to death
from one of these attempts. While Canada is not, at the moment, actively trying
to bring back the days of what I consider state maternal murder, it is
certainly happening in the US. Many states are losing women’s health
centers where abortions are provided, and the provider physicians are being
threatened or killed by religious fanatics.
The second reason that women’s right
to safe, legal abortions is so important not only to me, but to human evolution
everywhere, is that unless women can control the time and place when they will
become mothers, their very ability to control many other aspects of their
environment is threatened. Any concept of human freedom, of individual
decision making, of human evolution, depends on the recognition that our bodies
belong to us. It is only when our bodies are recognized as sacrosanct to
ourselves and to others, that we, as women, have the self-confidence to say to
the men that are tearing up our universe and the women who support them for
whatever reasons, “Listen, you guys, stop it! Just stop it. We will hound
you every day, we will shame you, we will not rest nor let you rest until this
disgusting destruction of all we hold dear is halted.” Justin Trudeau and Naomi
Kline, please get on the same page.
