June 2, 2006

I have not been murdered with premeditation and do hope, kind readers, that this remains the case. (Isn't it embarrassing that I assume it would be a reader and not a madman wheezing crystal meth onto my bedroom window left open on a hot day? No offence.)

But should I be dispatched, my killer should get 25 years in jail. He won't. Even Colin Thatcher, who still won't admit that he slaughtered his ex-wife, gets out on day parole. (How I resent this. Even Albert Speer served his 25 years to the day.)

But imagine this. There's a way to make my killer get the 50 years he deserves. The trick is, I have to be pregnant first.

An Alberta Conservative backbencher, Leon Benoit, has introduced a private member's bill on fetal homicide which says the killer of a pregnant woman should be charged with killing two people. Even though the Supreme Court refuses to define a fetus as a person under the law, Benoit's bill would see a fetus at any stage as a second murder victim.

The bill, which will likely fade away like all private members' bills, is just "common sense," an anti-abortion group told the Toronto Star. It's not even the tiniest bit an anti-abortion bill and if you think so, you're just paranoid, the group said.

Call me paranoid. If the fetus at any stage is a person and you kill it, as this bill would have it, then logically any woman choosing abortion gets 25 years in jail. She would be placed on a moral parallel with Thatcher, whose violent loathing of women haunts me when I remember his beautiful despairing victim.

I'm sympathetic to Benoit. For all that he is not my type — he fights as hard against same-sex marriage and the gun registry as he does for the restoration of the death penalty for gophers using now-banned strychnine — he means well in his own way. He met the heartbroken mother of a pregnant Edmonton woman who was shot to death. The mother is pro-choice but she's trying to find a way to punish a monster for robbing her of her grandson-to-be. Her suffering is beyond words. I would rather die than lose one of my stepdaughters.

But think of this. The leading cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S. is murder.

I am not making this up.

These women are not pretty, prosperous Laci Petersons married to plausible white psychopaths. They are black and poor, with no money for birth control or abortions or airplane tickets. I cannot think of a more damning statistic. But no American politician has mentioned it or made it his cause.

We're not much better at protecting women from violence. Preventing and punishing the murder of women is not a priority in Canada. Women are frequently killed by husbands and boyfriends despite years of pleading for police protection. Suggesting that the murder of pregnant women should receive extra consideration is odd, especially since such circumstances are normally covered during sentencing.

If this bill succeeded, almost all of us would see our lives devalued. Since men can't get pregnant, their killer would never get 50 years.

Most women are the unpregnant, the pre-pregnant or the post-pregnant. Should one of their tribe give birth without being murdered, they revert to "post-pregnant" status which would invite a lower sentence for their killer than would the slaughter of the pregnant.

I have taken care as an adult to be forever unpregnant and actually argue with my doctors who tell me I'm not old enough yet to rule it out. Damn ye medicine women!

Take heart, Heather. Possibly I have some status in the fact that I am theoretically "pre-pregnant," which is how the Christian Right regards the perfect woman: virginal, god-fearing and willing to marry another virgin so as to have baby after baby. Sounds like fun.

Never underestimate how women are despised. During the pope's recent visit to Poland, the government banished ads for lingerie, contraception and tampons, calling them frivolous. Tampons? Were they a reminder of our vile vaginas or the fact that some women were having periods and were thus the "unpregnant"? You can get through a lot of insomnia pondering stuff like this.

Pregnant women complain that men no longer stand up to offer them a seat on the subway. If we won't even let them sit, why would we value them more in death, even more than an actual mother. Call them the seatless dead. Do men think "Aw, I wish I'd given her my seat"?

This bill doesn't value women. It devalues them unless they're pregnant. And the killer won't get a double sentence for killing women. He'll get a double sentence for killing a possibility. I'm prejudiced in favour of actual humans, male and female alike.

As always, the woman herself is left saying "What about me?" Benoit should be campaigning for women's rights, for a day care system that would give a working mother the ability to save a pittance and flee a violent man. He should be fighting for battered women's shelters and better medical care for native women.

Those are complicated things. He's choosing a simpleminded way of demeaning women. This shames his decent impulse.