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.
Dr. Foster, in her book The Turnaway Study, begins and ends with the assumption that choice is good for women. This represents a pretty standard expression of pro-choice philosophy and it is worth emphasizing – it is the act of choosing that is considered positive. There is no inquiry into what is being chosen or how that choice bears out. As long as she chose it, it is good. This is not to say they ignore regret, but it assumes that “at least I chose it” will be a comfort.
This philosophy comes out in the chapter on mental health. Before comparing the results of women denied abortions verses women who had abortions, Dr. Foster hypothesizes about why abortion might or might not harm women’s mental health. This idea of “choice” makes both the positive and negative list.
Under ‘why abortion might be negative for women’, Dr. Foster mused that “an unintended pregnancy is a moment when your life feels like it is out of your control. Your body is creating another life against your will.” She follows this up with “having an abortion is something that women choose to do” as a reason it wouldn’t negatively impact women’s health. Notice the assumption. The unintended pregnancy is a problem because she didn’t choose it, while the abortion is not a problem because at least she chose it.
Dr. Foster does admit that an unintended pregnancy does not necessarily translate to an unwanted child, but for her it is all about what the woman chooses, concluding: “Abortion is not just about a woman’s right versus an embryo’s or fetus’s rights; it’s also about whether women get to have children when they are ready to care for them.” She even goes so far as promoting “the idea that personal bodily autonomy is a universal human right, as are the rights to have children or not have children.” Choice is foundational and it excludes examination of what is being chosen.
How you view life
This choice-focused philosophy naturally follows the ideal of an independent, autonomous life. Autonomy is a word that translates into auto (= self) and nomous (= law). Autonomy is self law. If your ideal life is one in which you, and you alone, choose and govern for yourself, then Dr. Foster is right. Being pregnant against your choice will harm your mental health, and taking back the choice by ending the pregnancy will alleviate that harm.
I am putting aside for a moment the reality that women generally choose to do the act that gets them pregnant. For the sake of assessing Dr. Foster’s approach, let’s grant that absurd argument that consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy. The problem with this philosophy is that once you are pregnant you are not solely an individual. Your life has become inextricably tied to another. We are never primarily independent beings; we are interdependent beings. We are relational creatures in the midst of a web of interconnecting relationships that each come with obligations and pressures.
And we don’t necessarily enter into these relationships by choice. As one scholar put it, “We are born into some obligations, and some are born to us.” You might choose your friends, but you don’t choose your family. Abortion ignores this relational reality. It ignores the fact that whether a mother chose it or not, she is relationally and physically interconnected with her child.
As Erika Bachiochi points out in her article Embodied Equality, we easily acknowledge that parents have duties, legal duties even, to at least provide their children with the basic necessities of life and hopefully much more in terms of physical and relational needs. We don’t base this duty on the parent’s consenting to take on that duty, nor are they able to revoke consent on a whim. Rather, we recognize a child’s dependence on their parents as placing special obligations on the stronger party. This becomes even more stark in the womb, where a child is completely physically dependent on their mother. Applying consent and the ability to revoke consent in that context has fatal consequences for the weaker party.
Deciding the value of life based on whether you chose it or not strikes me as strange. Especially this year, when we all are finding ourselves in situations that we did not choose in response to Covid-19. I don’t mean to undermine the stress that is felt due to these current unchosen circumstances. But the remarkable finding of The Turnaway Study is that removing that choice does not automatically harm mental health. Just because we are in unchosen circumstance does not make them bad circumstances.
Choice doesn’t end up being the key difference for women
When Dr. Foster concludes that women who had abortions were ‘better off’ than women denied abortions, it is not in the area of mental health. Rather, she is pointing to the fact that pregnancy takes a toll on a woman’s body and raising children costs money. Those differences between women denied abortions and women who had abortions do not come down to choice.
This is seen most starkly in the findings around mental health. Dr. Foster explains “I admit I was surprised by this finding. I expected that raising a child one wasn’t planning to have might be associated with depression or anxiety. But this is not what we found over the long run. Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term was not associated with mental health harm. Women are resilient to the experience of giving birth following an unwanted pregnancy, at least in terms of their metal health.”
If choice really is vital for women’s well being, if the harm of unintended pregnancy is that lack of control which can be alleviated by choosing either parenting or abortion, if Gloria Steinem’s endorsement of the book that “without the power to make decision about our own bodies, there is no democracy” were true, then surely we would expect that to come out in the stories of women denied abortions. What we actually see, though, is women changing their minds about wanting the abortion in the first place. While a week after being denied 65% of women surveyed still wanted an abortion, by the child’s first birthday this was down to 7% and five years later it was only 4%.
Remember, these are women who chose abortion. These are women who made it to the abortion clinic, despite travel expenses and the logistics of actually getting there. These aren’t women who just thought about abortion, these are women who made tangible steps to have an abortion. And yet the vast majority found that this initial choice was not actually what they wanted. In the end, it was not their choice to have the child, and they don’t regret that.
How access to abortion impacts women’s health both mentally and physically is a complex question, as The Turnaway Study reveals. But one thing is very clear: it does not come down to choice. Choosing one way or another is not the deciding factor in what impact abortion has on women.
Dr. Foster ends her book saying that ultimately abortion “is about women’s control over their own lives.” But this is not borne out by the very data included in her book! Her assumed premise leads to a forced conclusion that does an injustice to the real impact of abortion on women.
This was my main take away after reading Erika Bachiochi’s article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy called “Embodied Equality: Debunking Equal Protection Arguments for Abortion Rights”. We are humans. And this has implications for how we approach abortion and gender equality. You can read the entire paper here. It’s written in an American legal context, but she highlights two human traits that have profound implications for abortion regardless of where you live.
#1: Humans have Physical Bodies
Some argue that abortion restrictions are inherently sexist because they only limit women. Bachiochi’s response is very simple – abortion restrictions are not sexist just because it is those with female bodies who get pregnant. This is biological reality, not a sexist limitation imposed by law. It is only women who gestate and give birth.
But is biology unfair here? Do abortion restrictions place a burden on women that is not placed on men, limiting women’s ability to “define the content of their present and future lives”? Putting aside for the moment the way this denigrates motherhood as a future, this argument points out that, while men can walk away from the procreative act seemingly without consequence, women cannot. Therefore, women need abortion to even the playing field – to achieve gender equality.
But that argument assumes something about equality. To even the playing field it presumes “one sex as the standard for equality: the male sex.” But why are we using the male biology and experience as our ideal? Especially when doing so only perpetuates inequality, rather than addressing the real cause of it.
Bachiochi explains: “The legal availability of abortion has worked to detach men further from the potentialities of female sexuality, offering them the illusion that sex can finally be completely consequence-free. The trouble is that, for women, sex that results in pregnancy is fraught with consequence. Women must act affirmatively – and destructively – if they are to imitate male reproductive autonomy.”
Promoting abortion as the equalizer has not helped women. Rather, it elevates the male biology and discourages exploring solutions that might actually better women’s lives when they are facing unplanned pregnancies. In this context, for women to achieve equality they must undergo an invasive medical procedure and sacrifice their child’s life.
This brings us to the second observation by Bachiochi.
#2: Humans are Relational
A pregnant woman is not in a bubble by herself. There is the child’s father. There are her parents, his parents, siblings, friends, coworkers, and the list goes on. The reality is that we are all a part of a relational community whether we realize it or not.
And when it comes to pregnancy, a child is inextricably physically and relationally linked to her mother.
We have no trouble recognizing this connection after a child is born. We acknowledge that parents have duties, legal duties, to at least provide their children the basic necessities of life and hopefully much more in terms of physical and relational needs. We don’t base this duty on the parent’s consenting to take on that duty, nor are they able to revoke consent on a whim. Rather, we recognize a child’s dependence on their parents as placing special obligations on the stronger party.
This is because humans are relational creatures. At our very core, and most starkly from our earliest moments of existence, we depend on those around us. And others rely on us. How do we treat these relationships? Are they extinguishable based on our choice? Or are they something to respect and value?
This is where Bachiochi gets into relational feminism which posits that we are “fundamentally embedded in relationships of interdependence.” This theory rejects the modern view of humans as radically autonomous individuals and argues that the interdependent relationships we have are not to be scorned, but respected. Quoting one feminist, she says: “We are born into some obligations, and some are born to us.”
Abortion ignores this relational reality. It ignores the fact that whether a mother chose it or not, she is relationally interconnected with her child. Abortion ruptures that connection with fatal consequence to the more dependent party. That is a tragedy. The fact that abortion restrictions act to protect the more dependent party is a good thing for both the child and the woman. Whether or not we always enjoy the relationships around us, we cannot ignore them.
In no way does Bachiochi suggest this is always easy for women. She points out that it “may not lessen the hardship of bearing yet another child, or a first child before one feels prepared.” But the alternative is to ignore that we are physical and relational humans. The pro-life movement is well versed in the cost of ignoring the pre-born child’s humanity. And there is most definitely a cost in ignoring women’s humanity.
Abortion might seem to make women more like men, but at the cost of her humanity. You cannot deny the female biology and the reality of the relational context around and within her without dire consequences.
But opening up to the reality of what it means to be a human – and what it means to be a woman – opens you up to all that this life has to offer. As Bachiochi describes, “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.”
We’re in the pro-life movement because we believe in human rights. HUMAN rights. Not hypothetical rights. Not ignore-what-it-means-to-be-human rights. But humans-with-bodies-and-relationships-rights. Human rights – with all the joy, the hardship, and the profound beauty that accompanies being a human.
This observation was made by Caitlin Flanagan in a recent Atlantic article in a rare attempt at fairly describing both the pro-abortion and the pro-life argument. She does indeed use a picture – a 3D ultrasound of 12-week pre-born child with fingers, toes, eyelid, and ears. “She can hiccup—that tiny, chest-quaking motion that all parents know,” Flanagan says, highlighting the humanity of the pre-born child and acknowledging the destructive nature of abortion.
And yet, she views legal abortion as a necessity.
The many words Flanagan uses to describe the pro-abortion argument revolve around heart wrenching stories of back alley abortions. They may be hard to read, but it is important to face their reality. While the number of illegal abortions and resulting fatalities prior to-legal abortion are often grossly exaggerated, I have no reason to doubt the credibility of the specific stories Flanagan tells.
And it is a repeat of these stories of deaths due to illegal abortions that Flanagan views as inevitable if pro-life legislation is put in place. Completely accepting the humanity of the child, she still argues for abortion to “save” women, saying, “We accepted that we might lose that growing baby, but we were not also going to lose that woman.”
Flanagan speaks of accepting the loss – but who is supposed to be accepting it? A mother and a father certainly lose their child to abortion. Grandparents lose their grandchildren. Siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles all lose a family member. Communities lose members. As a society we lose a part of us. Maybe Flanagan is even speaking of her personal loss. We all lose to abortion. Do we accept this?
And there is one who loses all. After all, a “safe” legal abortion is never safe for the baby. Is Flanagan speaking on behalf the baby when she accepts their loss?
As a pro-life movement, we should absolutely be concerned about back alley abortions – we have no wish to lose women. We counter back alley abortion for the same reason we counter all abortions. It is not just legal abortions that stop a beating heart – we have the same objection to illegal abortions. We share the pro-abortion movement’s abhorrence for back alley abortions.
If abortion was illegal, we would still have work to do. We would still be busy educating about the humanity of the pre-born child, we would be encouraging the prosecution of those performing back alley abortions (characters Flanagan glosses over in her stories), and we would still be there to come alongside women facing unplanned pregnancies – whether it be with financial support, counsel, or just a friendly conversation.
The pro-life movement does not accept losing a growing baby, nor are we going to accept losing the women. To suggest that the pro-life movement is okay with back alley abortions is to misunderstand both the value of pre-born life as well as our valuing of women.
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One Child Nation is a documentary narrated by Nanfu Wang, a filmmaker from China seeking to understand the infamous one-child policy she grew up with. It is a personal issue for Nanfu. Her name means “man pillar” as her parents wanted a son, but when they had a girl still hoped that she would grow up strong like a man. Her parents later had the desired son – something Nanfu grew up ashamed of. None of her friends had siblings. She felt like her family had done something wrong.
The documentary reveals the world Nanfu grew up in – a world immersed in propaganda praising the one-child policy. This propaganda included the promise that fewer children would lead to prosperity, the fear of overpopulation, and even the horrifying vision of China descending into cannibalism. This propaganda was internalized by the culture. Some disliked the harsh enforcement it allowed – which included forced abortions or sterilization, high fines, and destruction of homes if they failed to pay – but many people Nanfu interviewed still argue in favor of the policy.
The blind belief in dramatic horror stories used to justify human rights violations will sound familiar to those active in the pro-life movement. “If you have more than one child, we will all become cannibals” is not that dissimilar of an argument from, “If we don’t allow abortions, we will have too many poor people.” Both premises are questionable, and the cure seems just as, if not more, atrocious than the problem.
One of the most powerful elements of this documentary is that Nanfu shows the devastation of the one-child policy. She shows the victims – the young children who lost their lives, either abandoned or killed. The victims are not hypothetical ideas, or abstract statistics. Everyone from parents who abandoned their child to avoid being stuck with a girl, to family planning officers who carried out the policy all shrugged and said they had to go along with the policy. The documentary shows the real cost of indifference toward human life.
There is a line near the end of the documentary that will comes across as jarring, as it goes from critiquing China’s propaganda to supporting our culture’s pro-abortion propaganda. But I hope that the reality shown in the rest of the documentary will be the lasting impact. My hope is that viewers will take pause at the cost of turning a blind eye to human rights violations, will question what propaganda is being propagated in our own culture, and will consider the cost of indifference in being complicit in the atrocities of our time.
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Generally, it is assumed that this means they are carefully scrutinizing each leadership hopeful for whether they are “pro-life” or “pro-choice”, but the time has come for the pro-life movement to view things a bit differently.
What do we mean by that?
It means that we don’t necessarily need a leadership candidate to champion the issue, or even be identified as pro-life. Pro-lifers who are involved in the Conservative Party shouldn’t automatically dismiss a candidate who isn’t personally pro-life. Pro-life Conservatives should be less concerned about whether a future leader looks like them and more concerned about whether he or she realizes that pro-life conservatives make up an integral part of the party’s base.
The pro-life movement was instrumental in Andrew Scheer’s successful leadership bid, and has the potential to play a large part in the upcoming race. We are motivated, organized, and politically engaged. Through the work of organizations such as RightNow and Campaign Life Coalition the pro-life movement has become very efficient at nominating and electing candidates. A successful leadership candidate needs support from the pro-life movement. Pulling out tired lines like ‘not re-opening the debate’ or claiming that abortion is a ‘settled issue’ in Canada could be detrimental to a leadership campaign.
With Canada’s brokerage party system, the likelihood of a leader in a mainstream party who is willing to introduce abortion legislation is not very high. It’s understandable that a potential Prime Minister is not going to run on this issue. What we as the pro-life movement should be looking for is a leader who understands that the abortion debate is ongoing and who will allow individual MPs to introduce bills or motions that address the current legal void around abortion.
The Conservative Party of Canada has pro-life MPs, pro-life staffers, pro-life volunteers, pro-life members, and pro-life donors. Leadership hopefuls cannot ignore them if they want to unite the party or win the next election.
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Michael Campbell hosts a show called “Money Talks” on Global News Radio. This show covers “everything to do with money: how to make it, how to spend it, how to grow it, and how to avoid letting it get away.” Unexpectedly, Campbell also dealt with the topic of abortion.
It was refreshing that, whether pro-life or not, Campbell was able to say simple facts about where we are as a country on this topic. At the end of the show, he talked about leaders of the federal parties in the aftermath of the election, venting his frustration with the way the media is talking about Andrew Scheer and his socially conservative views.
Campbell ends by making this statement about abortion:
“The suggestion when it comes to abortion that there’s agreement, I don’t see it. I see this. It’s completely legal – people don’t want to change that. But what about to what term? Right now, it’s legal through all nine-months of pregnancy – that would be a fascinating discussion. Where do Canadians think there is a limit to that? But there’s no consensus, I don’t believe.”
Agreed. It would be a fascinating discussion – and one that Canadians are starting to have. Take a moment to communicate with your representatives on the importance of their participation in this ongoing debate.
For audio of the clip mentioned, click play below.
But abortion does need to be talked about.
Since 2012, We Need a Law has existed with a mission to build support for legislation to protect pre-born children in Canada. Canada is the only country in the world without abortion legislation. The increased attention on pre-born children has raised awareness that our lack of a legal framework protecting pre-born children is largely the result of inaction by our political leaders.
Abortion should absolutely be a key topic of debate in every election cycle – and in the intervening four years. But the focus should be on measures that will be implemented by each party to protect these smallest members of the human family. Most Canadians agree that it is discriminatory to abort a healthy girl because you wanted a boy. Most Canadians are also disgusted at the idea that a child can be killed even when he is developed enough to survive outside of the womb.
But unfortunately, these were not the topics our leaders discussed. Instead, they viewed pre-born children as a political tool, either to scare people away from voting for one party or to reach out to an assumed support group with vague assurances. All parties seem to view pre-born children as merely part of a political strategy, not as human beings being denied their most basic human right.
What can we do differently?
As we analyze the results of this election, we must be wary of falling into the same trap. We need to avoid the polarizing drama or the partisan games when they cause the focus to move away from the pre-born child and the need to have legal protection for the child. We Need a Law is non-partisan. One of the reasons for this is because we understand abortion to be a human rights issue, not a partisan issue. We focus on getting Canadians to start the conversation with their representative regardless of the party. We want you to develop a relationship and influence your leaders to start honestly seeing the human victim of abortion – the pre-born child.
This isn’t merely a numbers game of getting the most MPs from a particular party. There is a culture that needs to change. A culture in Ottawa in the way they discuss this issue, and a culture across Canada. One change that needs to happen is a shift to talking about actual legislation rather than focusing on whether someone personally holds a correct opinion. Pro-abortion Parliamentarians have had it easy, never having had to counter actual abortion legislation; abortion legislation like what the rest of the world has managed to implement, abortion legislation that most Canadians would support.
For too long, we’ve allowed the political conversation to be about personal opinions and vague ideas. This needs to change. We need to see real abortion legislation on the table, and MPs need to have a real conversation about what it would look like here in Canada.
Canadians are already having very real, serious, nuanced conversations about pre-born human rights. Our politicians do us and pre-born children an inexcusable disservice by refusing to engage in the debate in the same way. It’s time for our politicians to engage in a serious conversation about legislation that would, at the very least, bring our country into line with other Western democracies. We need a framework around late-term abortion, sex-selective abortion, and pre-born victims of crime. We need to recognize the humanity of our own children before they exit the womb.
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Abortion provides a bandage solution for problems like intimate partner violence, sexual abuse, lack of social supports, poverty, and myriad other issues our leaders should be focused on. If we advocate for life, we can also call on our leaders to address these related issues. If we call for death as a solution in any area, we can have no basis for an expectation that they will improve standards of living across our nation.
Yes, I agree with Prasad’s premise that health care services should be accessible to all, not just those lucky enough to live in the right place. But abortion is not healthcare. Healthcare seeks to heal, treat or prevent disease. Pregnancy is not a disease, and when serious complications arise there are always options that care for both mother and child. Delivering a baby alive to save a mother’s life, even if it may not survive, is inherently different than killing that pre-born child before removing it from the womb.
Yes, abortion access is spotty across Canada. But so is actual healthcare. If your appendix bursts in Northern Ontario, or you suffer a stroke in rural Saskatchewan, your medical care access is not going to be the same as it would in a major city centre. Abortion should be the least of our concerns – barring labour, pregnancy is about the safest medical condition one can have if you’re worried about getting to the doctor while the symptoms are still present. Framing abortion as a healthcare issue is an attempt to mask the fact that this is a human rights issue.
Prasad states that “abortion remains one of, if not the most stigmatized essential health service in Canada. While the 1988 Supreme Court ruling should have settled that abortion be treated like any other medical procedure, our lack of progress shows how thorny of an issue it still is.” But the Supreme Court ruling never intended to settle the issue. Rather, even the most liberal of the judges wrote that the pre-born child should be given protection at some stage. It left the law-making to Parliament, as is the Court’s place. It is only Parliament’s inaction and cowardice that has left us the only democracy in the world without restrictions on abortion.
The abortion debate is open, it always has been. The majority of Canadians support limits on abortion, and always have. But the status quo brought about by fearful lawmakers means the womb is a uniquely dangerous place to be in Canada. In the womb, we have human beings not considered persons under the law. It is the only place a human being has no legal protection, but is left completely at the mercy of someone bigger and stronger than themselves. We want leaders who will advocate tirelessly for the vulnerable and voiceless, not throw them under the political bus.
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This law against sex-selection recognizes a potential abuse of reproductive technology, and addresses potential inequalities by eliminating the risk of sex-targeted fertility treatments. However, should IVF be successful and a pregnancy result, there is no law against aborting that same pre-born child based on its sex. When pregnancy with multiples – twins or triplets – results, it is not uncommon to decide to “reduce the pregnancy” by aborting the child or children of the undesired sex. This dichotomy sends a mixed message on whether life really is valued equally, whether male or female.
Dr. Albert Yuzpe, co-founder of the Genesis Fertility Centre in Vancouver, says the demand for sex-selection during IVF is ongoing in Canada. American websites regularly advertise to Canadians, knowing they can provide options that are illegal in Canada. For example, Overlake Reproductive Health offers payment options for Canadians, has connections with clinics in British Columbia so some appointments can be done in Canada, and promotes their “family balancing” services. Canadian clinics are feeling the pressure, and some may be bowing to it in the interest of increasing business.
In the U.S., where sex selection in IVF is legal, one doctor says that 85% of his patients come to him so they can choose the sex of their baby. This is not IVF as a means of getting pregnant when other means have failed – this is IVF as a means of attempting to control life.
The Assisted Human Reproduction Act of Canada bans sex selection of implanted embryos. The UK and Australia have similar laws. These laws show a basic understanding that we should not determine who gets to live based on their sex. But our lack of abortion law contributes to and confuses the issue, especially when we see that girls are aborted at a much higher rate than boys in some parts of Canada.
We can’t stop prospective parents from traveling to the U.S. and elsewhere for sex selection. But we can and should use law and public dialogue to promote the notion that in this country, both sexes are equally valuable. This includes the need for a law banning sex selective abortion.
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