While the result is obviously disappointing, there is also reason for thankfulness. The vote in the House was 248 – 82, meaning a quarter of Parliamentarians supported it. While the Bloc, Liberal, and NDP parties unanimously opposed the bill, a full two-thirds of the Conservative caucus supported it, as well as Independent MP Derek Sloan.

We Need a Law commends MP Wagantall for bringing the issue of sex selective abortion into the open. We had the opportunity to advance the conversation and see the first abortion bill in 15 years introduced in Parliament. During the debate on this bill, speakers from all parties indicated they opposed the practice of sex selective abortion. They were simply unwilling to take a stand.

Perhaps most encouraging, and proof that this conversation will not end here, is that we saw incredible support for this bill from Canadians across the country. MP Wagantall and her colleagues introduced dozens of petitions with well over ten thousand signatures over the past year in support of Bill C-233. During the lead-up to the debate, MP’s offices were flooded with thousands of empty pink envelopes from Canadians, each one representing a pre-born girl lost to abortion. MPs used these pink envelopes to highlight the issue on their own social media. We also saw pink flag displays and lawn signs pop up around the country in support of this bill.

It was evident in the debates that while Canadians are having ongoing conversations about abortion, elected lawmakers seem unprepared for it. In fact, they seemed angry about having to discuss the issue. Yet most Canadians support common sense abortion restrictions, including a restriction on sex selective abortion.

The debate around sex selective abortion is necessary and will continue. Women’s rights cannot include targeting women before they are born. Sex selective abortion is antithetical to Canada’s commitment to equality and needs to be prohibited as an unacceptable practice. Until MPs have the courage to prohibit this practice, it remains legal and will continue to happen in Canada.

So our political responsibility as pro-life Canadians continues.

Use this opportunity to build a relationship with your Member of Parliament. Find out how they voted and send them a quick email regarding the vote. If you’ve already contacted your MP, let them know you followed the unfolding of this bill, and leave them with a few words of encouragement for their task.

Not sure where to find your MP’s email address? Click here for a full list of MPs and access to their contact information.

The pandemic has impacted our communication for well over a year but this hasn’t prevented Canadians from engaging on Bill C-233, a bill to prohibit sex-selective abortion. This bill, introduced at around the same time as our lives were interrupted by COVID-19, is sponsored by MP Cathay Wagantall and it is finally making its way through the House of Commons.

Canadians have signed tens of thousands of petitions, sent in hundreds of emails, and handwritten over 30,000 pink envelopes to their MPs. As evidenced by the number of MPs sharing posts and videos of all this communication, it clearly makes a difference!

Yet, with only weeks remaining before Bill C-233 is voted on, the most effective thing you can do is to arrange for a face-to-face meeting with your Member of Parliament to outline why you want them to support Ms. Wagantall’s bill. With lockdown restrictions in place, we have had great success in training people how to connect with their MP via a Zoom video call.

The power of a personal plea far outweighs any other form of communication and through our presentations we have equipped many of you to do just this. Not sure this is for you? Don’t have Zoom or even know how to go about booking a meeting? Slide through the following images which give a quick step by step guide on how to accomplish this.

We look forward to assisting you in every way we can!

If you don’t live in London, you can still be involved in raising awareness about sex selective abortion and raising support for the Sex Selective Abortion Act! Here are a few things you can do today:

We are going to end this series on The Turnaway Study where we started: pointing out the lack of acknowledgement of the child who loses their life to abortion, and the impact of that loss on women. Yes, 95% of the women said abortion was the right decision for themselves, but reading through their stories I can’t help but wonder about the path not taken and about the life not lived.

This comes out in Amy’s story. Amy had an abortion when her born daughter was 10. Years later, when her born daughter was a teenager, Amy says “everything that I’ve ever done, ever worked for, has been for her.” Despite claiming to have never wanted more children, she talks about how she has taken in her daughter’s low-income boyfriend, saying, “It’s funny that I never wanted any more children, but here I am helping out another one. So it’s so funny, I tease him, ‘you’re the son that I never wanted.’” It leaves you wondering about how much love she would have had for the “never wanted” child she lost to abortion.

Kiara had an abortion when she was 26 years old. Later on, she tells of her subsequent child. “With the newest baby, my husband and I weren’t actively trying, but we weren’t not trying. It actually happened fairly quickly, so I was like, it was meant to be. I don’t think you’re ever ready fully. You always go, ‘It’s a good time; let’s have a baby.’ Then, you get pregnant and you’re like, ‘All right, wow. Here we are.’”

“I don’t think you’re ever ready fully,” Kiara explains. What would have happened if she had that perspective towards her first child?

And yet, the unexpected love

Melissa describes a subsequent pregnancy after her abortion, when pro-life relatives showed up offering support and asking her not to abort her child. Those relatives now watch her born daughter every day. She concludes with this reflection on parenting: “When I was growing up, I didn’t want any kids. I didn’t picture myself as a mother…I had that first child, and you find out that you love them no matter what…You think, there’s no way I can love anyone in the world more than I love this baby right here. Then you have another one. And you worry when you’re pregnant, am I going to love this one like I do that one? There’s no way; you don’t want it. Then you have that second one and you love them totally different. There’s no amount of love more for one than the other; it’s overwhelming.” Melissa was able to accept her subsequent children and found the love overwhelming. It’s tragic she missed out on that love with one of her children.

All of these women likely said that the abortion was the right decision for them. Many were quite sure they were unable to parent, that it wasn’t the right time, but there is little explanation of the difference between the situations where they had an abortion versus the situation they were in when they gave birth to other unintended children.

A risky endeavor – but worth it

Pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting are all difficult. Dr. Foster goes into detail about the health risks of giving birth, including the rare but tragic cases where a woman even loses her life. She concludes, “The fact that women regularly choose to endure this and are thrilled with the outcome shouldn’t blind us to the fact that pregnancy is a risky endeavor.” So why do women take on this risky endeavor? What is it out being a mother that we view as worth the risk? The answer is the life that comes into existence. The human being born into this world is what makes woman thrilled with the outcome.

It’s hard to read the stories in this book without mourning what could have been. What if these women had opened themselves up to the endless possibilities that bringing a child into this world can bring? No one is suggesting pregnancy and motherhood are easy. Relationships, love, others, bring with them complexity, heartbreak, and pain. But they also bring joy, love, and wonder to our lives. As Erika Bachiochi points out, “In the experience of most women, pregnancy is a serious challenge, but one well worth the sacrifices made because of the profundity of the enterprise.”

As my colleague Anna once put it: “Abortion is a choice. A choice that is easier, maybe, than the very hard choice of parenting. Simpler, maybe, than dealing with the relationship consequences of keeping a pregnancy. Faster, certainly, than carrying to term and giving a child up for adoption. But, morally and ethically, it has the power to make people feel shame because it is shameful to say that your choice is worth more than someone else’s life, that your future is worth wiping out someone else’s future.”

It is this that Dr. Foster misses in The Turnaway Study. It is the lives that are lost to abortion. Lives that, whether intended or not, are intertwined physically and relationally with their mothers. The idea that we can just dispose of these children without consequence to their mothers is absurd and not reflected in the lived experiences of women.

For Dr. Foster in The Turnaway Study, abortion is fundamentally about “choice,” as we saw in a previous post in this series. This combines with another frequent theme throughout the stories: the hard circumstances of the women seeking abortion. For these women, their circumstances are driving them to choose abortion over parenting, whether those circumstances be their relationship, financial situation, or career aspirations.

Between not choosing to become pregnant in the first place and women’s difficult circumstances, the assumption is that the solution is to be, well, un-pregnant.

The lie of abortion: the unchosen pregnancy is the problem

Abortion at its core sees the pre-born child as a problem that needs to be erased. But women who seek abortions are capable of parenting, as the vast majority of the women denied abortions prove. The fallout out from this misidentification of the problem means that the real problems women face are not being addressed.

This came out in reading Martina’s story. Despite seemingly being sure of her choice to abort, she could not stop crying at the clinic. To comfort herself she read through journals that contained stories of previous clients. “One story I read, a woman’s husband wouldn’t let her get birth control, and she kept getting pregnant. Since she was able to pay for abortions with cash, he didn’t know that she was continually getting abortions because she continued to get pregnant. And they already had, like three or four kids. He basically thought that he was right, she didn’t need to have birth control, they just won’t get pregnant again, you know? But no, she had three additional abortions because he wouldn’t let her get birth control.”

Martina was comforted by this story and others like it. She concludes her personal reflections saying, “Hopefully we can agree that it’s difficult no matter what you choose, and people just need to be supportive. Women don’t need to be told this isn’t the right choice.”

In Martina’s eyes the woman in the story was facing troubling circumstances that necessitated abortion as the solution. Rather than either leaving or standing up to her husband, having a clear conversation about the consequences of their actions, this woman used abortion to continue her life as it was. How is that helping her? I’ll agree with Martina that it is a difficult situation, but I will most emphatically question why allowing the situation to continue is supposed to be good for that woman.

Where adoption fits into this narrative

The assumption that difficult circumstances are fixed by abortion is also starkly challenged when Dr. Foster discusses women who were denied abortion due to being past the gestational limit allowed at the clinic. Dr. Foster had an expectation that the problem would remain the unchosen pregnancy, and the women would still seek a way out of becoming a parent. And yet, she was “surprised how few of the women who wanted to abort their pregnancies decided to place the child for adoption when they were unable to get an abortion.”

Dr. Foster, seemingly logically, assumed that women who wanted abortions would still not want to parent even if they were denied abortions. She assumed that abortion and adoption are comparable alternatives – both ways to avoid parenthood. But the data doesn’t bear this out. Instead, a week after being denied an abortion, only 14% of women were considering adoption and only 9% actually chose that route.

One of the main reasons that women didn’t choose adoption was because they ended up with more support from their community than they thought they would have – their circumstances weren’t as bad as they thought. All this points to the reality that Dr. Foster’s concern over the “chosen” nature of a woman’s position is overstated and we should be paying a lot more attention to women’s circumstances.

To be clear, adoption is a radical, loving, pro-life option. But generally, women don’t choose adoption even when denied an abortion. Abortion and adoption are not natural alternatives to each other, as they are based on very different foundations. Adoption, like parenting, at its core acknowledges the value of the child before and after birth and seeks to place that child in a setting grounded in self-sacrificial love.

Let’s offer real solutions

If adoption is not a common choice for women denied abortion, we need to again consider real challenging circumstances and real solutions. Frederica Mathewes-Green discusses the influence of circumstances in her book Real Choices. She points out that the appeal of abortion is like that of an eraser. “Denial is an attractive response to many difficult situations in life, and abortion serves denial better than adoption or childrearing would.” There can be a desire to return to a life just like it was before. But the problem is that such a rewind is impossible.

In the meantime, the pro-life movement doesn’t want to erase or deny women’s real problems. We don’t want to allow abusive relationships to continue, or leave women unsupported and alone. We want to come alongside each woman and help her realize her potential. She might think she can never finish school and have a child, or never have a career and have a child, or a whole host of barriers. But the pro-life message is that women can succeed without erasing their children.

The most publicized finding of The Turnaway Study was that 95% of women said the decision to have an abortion was right for them. This makes sense if the pregnancy is the problem and abortion is the eraser that allows life to go back to what it was. The problem is that life can’t go back to what it was. The abortion happened, and women are impacted. Reading the actual stories of the women reveals a little more nuance than that 95% statistic. Yes, these women believe it was the right decision for themselves, but that does not mean there are no unresolved issues with that choice. Women like Amber, for example, say it was the right decision but she also “tries not to think about” the abortion.

This mixture of emotions come out in the data as well. Following a woman’s abortion, the researchers asked women how they felt about their abortion. The most common emotion expressed was relief, but it was hardly the only emotion. Guilt and sadness were the next two highest reported emotions, followed by happiness, then regret, then anger.

Women’s stories of mixed emotions

Jada explained that her abortion made her more emotional: “I just became really sensitive to different life events. And when it came to children, it would just be different whenever I was around babies or when I saw babies on TV.”

Jessica, on the other hand, doesn’t admit to feeling a mixture of emotions but their presence comes out in her story. She is sure that the decision to abort was the right one for her because of her health issues. But there is underlying tension and hurt that comes out when she explains, “I don’t talk to anybody about it. It still is referred to as the A-word if it’s spoken about at all. You’ve got to make sacrifices sometimes no matter how bad it hurts.” She goes on to describe a day when her born kids went to a festival and came back with pro-life balloons that she quickly destroyed. “My kids cried, and my oldest one told me he hated me. I couldn’t tell him why, and he didn’t understand. Mama just popped my balloons, that’s all he knew.”

Why the mixed emotions?

The pro-life claim is not that every woman who has an abortion is going to face devastating mental health consequences. Rather, the pro-life claim is that abortion cannot be categorized as just another healthcare procedure. Abortion is the taking of a human life. A pregnant woman becomes a mother whether she chooses to embrace that role or not. The fact that women have unresolved complex emotions comes from what may be unacknowledged, but is the unmistakable reality of what happened. Jada gets emotional when she sees babies because she has lost her own. Jessica can’t handle pro-life balloons because of her own knowledge of what she chose, a choice that she can’t bear even naming.

This is the challenge to the pro-abortion position. How do you reconcile viewing abortion as just another medical procedure with these women’s mixed emotions? If the pre-born child is not a human being, why is there any struggle for women to accept and talk about their abortion? Dr. Foster at various points suggests that it is “stigma” or the opinions of others making women struggle (more on that in the next post). But if the pro-life movement is just wrong, why did Jessica feel the need to pop those balloons? If it’s just another medical procedure, why does Amber try not to think about it? If her abortion didn’t end the life of her child, why does Jada get emotional when she sees babies?

Mixed emotions surrounding abortion make sense from a pro-life position. But from a true pro-choice position, they are illogical. This study shows again that abortion has mental implications, and no touting of a 95% satisfaction rate will change that for women who choose abortion.