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.
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.
]]>
Many of our former classmates had heard about the advocacy work I was involved with. They supported the idea that Canada needs to get in line with other Western nations by implementing restrictions on abortion. One particular conversation impressed this necessity on me all the more.
Our former classmate began by telling me about the time she lived in Calgary and worked at a downtown medical lab. This particular lab was located near the Kensington Clinic, a private, for-profit abortion facility. Her lab handled the majority of the clinic’s blood work. My classmate explained that the month of September was always extremely busy and was known as “Stampede Month” to healthcare workers. She must have sensed my confusion so she spelled it out for me: between eight and twelve weeks after the Calgary Stampede, a large number of women come in to abort the unexpected pregnancies resulting from sexual trysts during the Stampede.
I had always heard that abortion was used as a form of birth control, but never had it presented to me so vividly. The past decades have been marked by an increased focus on sex education including a plethora of contraceptive methods. One has to wonder why so many unexpected children are still conceived. Has any of this “safe sex” information penetrated the minds of those sitting through these progressive programs?
You would be naive not to realize that for many people, sex is just as much a part of the Stampede as pancake breakfasts and parades. But discarding your “products of conception” three months later is not an amoral act similar to, say, taking a ride on the Slingshot at the Stampede midway. We are constantly learning more about the physical and psychological consequences of induced abortion, especially for teenagers. With no laws regulating this procedure, women and girls are making irreversible decisions without proper counsel or even the minutest inclination that there may be negative implications for their health, not to mention the moral implications for the pre-born child.
This is why we need an abortion law. Dr. Margaret Somerville, director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, explains it well: “We need some law on abortion in Canada in order to recognize publicly and as a society that abortion is always a very serious ethical decision and that, as all the judges of the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the Morgentaler case, the lives of pre-born children, at least at a certain point in pregnancy, merit legal protection.”
Contrary to what abortion ideologues profess, abortion is not safer than childbirth. It is time for Canada to begin regulating abortion. “Stampede month” at the abortion clinic suggests that sowing wild oats in the evening and hoping for crop failure in the morning is not working. Abortion is a serious ethical issue. We can — indeed, we must — do better for our women and girls.
]]>