Abortion debate cancelled
March 3, 2008
Margaret Fung, President of Students for Bioethical Awareness (SBA), one of the hosting clubs, describes what happened: “I was told in a meeting by members of the York Federation of Students that debating abortion is comparable to debating whether a man should be allowed to beat his wife. They said that there is freedom of speech to a limit, and that abortion is not an issue to debate. They demanded that the event not take place and shut us down.” Present at this meeting in addition to Fung were Jeremy Salter, Executive Director of the York Federation of Students (YFS), Fuad Abdi, VP Operations of the YFS and also the Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Student Centre, and Amir Mohareb, President of the York Debating Society.
SBA, an official York University Student Club, worked with the York Debating Society to organize the debate. The debaters were Michael Payton from Freethinkers for the pro-choice side and Jose Ruba from the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Awareness for the pro-life side. It was to be an organized debate moderated by the York Debating Society. Both sides were ready and willing to debate, but after it was demanded the event be shut down, dozens of students planning on attending the event were turned away at the door.
I find it intersting how it was the atheist student organization that had stepped up to debate for the pro-abortion side.
But that’s a minor little detail. On one hand, it’s not so surprising that the York Federation of Students banned the event — like most campus student governments, YFS tends to espouse a fairly liberal worldview, and if there’s one thing that has become abundantly clear about liberal college and university students, it is that they are cowards who are so uncomfortable with the idea of having their views seriously and rationally challenged that they would rather just impose Censorship upon opinions with which they disagree.
And that’s really what this is — censorship, as surely as any HRC ruling would be.
And that’s a shame, and a major loss for the students of York University. The Reader is free to take whatever view s/he cares to take on the abortion debate (my own views are reasonably well-known), but I encourage the reader to look past this situation as being merely another instance of pro-lifers attempting to protest the killing of the unborn. This was supposed to be a debate which both sides were looking forward to — it was intended to be an intellectual discussion of the issue, with facts arrayed against facts and argument arrayed against argument. With both sides presented, the participants in the debate and the audience of the debate would be free, at the end, to make their own decisions about the abortion issue…and would be able to do so with a goodly deal of evidence and reasoning to draw upon. That’s the beauty of honest debate — it really brings things out into the open.
Of course, Jose Ruba is a persuasive speaker and devastating in debates, and probably would have carried the day. Which, I think, was something the YFS was afraid of — the risk that some students might swing their views around to the pro-life side was an unacceptable one, and so the event had to be cancelled. And that’s what’s shameful. Universities and colleges are supposed to be about critical thought, about looking at things rationally and making informed decisions after consideration of different arguments and evidence. They are supposed to be places of learning, not places where groupthink is the rule of the day. And yet increasingly, thanks to groups like the YFS, and thanks to university and college faculties and administrations which are likewise cowardly, the tradition of critical thinking in higher education is fading, being replaced by encouragement to follow the approved consensus view.
YFS couldn’t take the risk that even one more student might barbarically begin to believe that the unborn are every bit as human, and every bit as deserving of a right to live, as any of the students filling York’s lecture halls. So the debate about abortion was cancelled. That’s a loss for all the students at York, and one more nail in the coffin of freedom of expression and critical thinking.
Update: Mark Shea has the best one-line take on this whole issue:
I sometimes get the sense that Canada is about one half hour into America’s future.
Ouch, Mr. Shea…ouch.
Update, Part Deux: Welcome, Steynians!
