This month, Canada's Parliament will vote on whether to re-open the thorny issue that has bedeviled philosophers and theologians for over two millennia: Are women human beings? OK, the actual question up for debate in Motion 312 is whether "a child is or is not a human being before the moment of complete birth" -- but you can't have it both ways, or even halfway. Any legal rights given to a fetus must be taken away from the pregnant woman, period. Even under a majority Conservative government that is gradually snuffing out women's ability to exercise their human rights, the supporters of Motion 312 have a huge hole to dig before they can hope to bury those rights forever.

The many fatal flaws of Motion 312 have been pointed out repeatedly by myself and others, but allow me to emphasize two key points:

1) The motion has no other purpose except as a vehicle to re-criminalize abortion. But access to safe and legal abortion is a fundamental right for women, protected under constitutional guarantees to bodily security, life, liberty, and conscience. It is impossible for women to achieve equality without control over their fertility.

2) The motion's sponsor (Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth) has exploited a linguistic confusion in the Criminal Code, which states that "A child becomes a human being… when it has completely proceeded, in a living state from the body of its mother." But the clause defines when a fetus becomes a legal person, not a human being in the biological sense. One has nothing to do with the other, yet the motion wrongly conflates the two. The science of fetal development does not dictate whether a fetus should have constitutional rights.