The second political party in Quebec in terms of Francophone voting intentions recently fielded an anti-abortion candidate.
Éric Duhaime has just included in his “health duo” the Dr Roy Eappen, a physician who has repeatedly spoken out against abortion on his personal blog and on Facebook in recent years. In 2015, he wrote: “I am pro-life. I will not kill babies or adults, as prescribed by Hippocrates. Today, he reassures us: he does not want to legislate on abortion, he rather intends to “talk to people to change their opinion”.
As a woman and as a doctor, I wonder about this notion of “talking to people to change their opinion”. The Dr Does Eappen mean by this that health professionals should restore the moralizing and paternalistic discourse towards pregnant women and try to dissuade those who seek an abortion? Or does he rather mean that as a deputy doctor, he would devote himself to promoting his anti-abortion position with the population?
Studies show that restricting access to abortion leads to interventions being carried out in precarious conditions, which increases maternal mortality. It is for this reason, among others, that the WHO calls for access to legal and safe abortions for all women. In this context, how the Dr Can Eappen distort the Hippocratic oath to the point of considering that it enjoins doctors to refuse to assist pregnant women who do not have the means or the desire to raise a child?
I also wonder about his view of other women’s rights over their own bodies. In 2017, in the ottawa citizenwe could read his opinion on the movement: if he was initially delighted to see Harvey Weinstein fall, a supporter of the Democratic Party, he considered the movement as a “total panic”.
Yet statistics show that one in three women is the victim of at least one sexual assault in her lifetime. ” Grab ’em by the pussy is therefore a practice that is more common than exceptional, and its denunciation has nothing to do with collective hysteria.
In the same article, we learned that the Dr Eappen is climatosceptic, and in The duty, in 2010, that he has a grudge against the “environmental Stalinists”. Despite his scientific training, he therefore seems to believe that climate change constitutes another total panic, even though it has been pointed out by climatologists as an outright threat to populations. I conclude that in his eyes, the immorality of women wishing to terminate their pregnancies represents a greater threat to life than the last report of the IPCC.
” Personal opinion “
Mr. Duhaime, about the anti-abortion position of his candidate, goes there with a nonchalant “People are entitled to their personal opinion”. Is that so. The human rights acquired in the last decades are therefore still subject to debate, according to him. On this account, do people also have the right to be against homosexuality? For conversion therapies? On February 20, at Everybody talks about it, after admitting that everything in Quebec on the radical right supported him, Mr. Duhaime was offended that a guest made reference to the impact that this electorate could have on the rights of the LGBT community. “You say that my electorate is homophobic! he exclaimed, as if it were whimsical to make a link between the far right and homophobia…
However, as early as August 2019, Radio-Canada published a report documenting the increase in homophobic comments on social networks in Quebec, a phenomenon linked to the influence of the American far right and its progression on a global scale. The researcher Benjamin Ducol explained to us that “thealt right takes up the idea that homosexuality is against nature, but has developed a new discourse according to which the diversity of gender and sexual orientation is perverting Western identity”.
It is therefore permissible to find naive a politician who relies on an electorate promoting intolerance towards all minorities while believing that homosexuals and homosexuals will be magically spared.
But beyond that question, does Mr. Duhaime actually believe that the Dr Eappen is in a position to politically represent the values of Quebecers when he is anti-abortion and climatosceptic, when he presents himself as a monarchist and when he is so opposed to the law on secularism that, a faithful Christian, he calls himself ready to show off the cross he wears around his neck if need be?
The rise of the extreme right, from which we have naively thought ourselves immune, in Canada, does not bode well for women and minorities. They will have to fight harder for the recognition of their rights. And they will. The #MeToo movement in 2017 followed Trump’s election. If the Dr Eappen intends to “talk to people to convince them of his anti-abortion position”, he will find on his way, in the population and in the health system, women ready to fight for their rights (men too).