Time Immortal

TheSpaceAdmiral writes in with a comment about this article.

women were not considered persons at one point in Canadian history (and so could legally be murdered)

I don’t get this. Are you joking? If you’re serious, I’d like to see a source or more details. I’m genuinely curious. Certainly as early as 1868 — long before the “Persons Case” — men were hanged for murdering women in Canada. If we’re talking pre-Confederation, there are records of men being executed for murdering females at least as far back as 1858.

I’m neither serious nor joking — I’m staring at a typo. I got my wires crossed, so to speak; I had been meaning to comment on a different aspect of law that made it possible for husbands to, in effect, rape their wives (a law that in fact persisted for some time after the “Person’s Case”), but got sidetracked.

I’ve corrected the initial article, and my thanks go out to TheSpaceAdmiral for pointing out the mistake. Serves me right for trying to multi-task.

As an interesting follow-up to what Fane points out above, Barbara Kay notes, in the National Post, thusly, regarding feminist arguments that the unborn, as non-persons, can legally be killed.

But wait: Women were not “legal persons” until 1929. That didn’t mean that before 1929 their husbands had the right to kill them.

Fane’s brief historical details (above) corroborate this observation, and in fact — taken together — what one is left with is a substantially more powerful argument against abortion and the non-logic of modern feminist arguments in its favour. After all, while in the past various legally-designated non-persons have been systematically murdered, the murder of a woman was (as Fane points out) nevertheless a punishable offence, even though no person — from a legal standpoint — had been killed. Would that we could apply even a sliver of such thinking to the current abortion situation.