It was a passing comment on a Montreal radio show last week but I’ve heard it so often before. The host was interviewing Catherine Megill, a spokesperson for the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC), a new “pro-choice” group. He agreed with her about the need for more access to abortion in Canada. In case anyone listening was unclear about where he stood on the issue, he said that he was not pro-abortion. Megill quickly jumped in to say that no one is pro-abortion and one or both followed up with the usual line about what a difficult and agonizing choice it was, etc.

I agree about the agonizing part except I would go further. It is horrific. It is comparable to Sophie’s Choice (a novel by William Styron), in which the Jewish mother of two is forced by a Nazi official to choose which of her two children will be left alive. She chooses, but in the end both die and she is haunted and crippled for the rest of her life by the choice she made.

In Sophie’s case, the “choice” was forced by a Nazi soldier in a concentration camp. In Canada, the abortion choice is tarted up as “women’s reproductive health,” promoted by governments and paid for by taxpayers. There is no hint that there might be repercussions—physical or psychological—to the choice. And for the most part, abortion advocates deny that post-abortion grief exists so there is no outlet for women who feel guilt that they have chosen to kill the child in their womb.

What rankles, however, is that label “pro-choice” and the accompanying “anti-choice” tag reserved for pro-life individuals and groups. Here’s an excerpt from the ARCC press release: “We want to make sure that Conservatives don’t try to impose their anti-choice ideology on all Canadian women.”

I am not “anti-choice.” Like most people, I make choices every day. What to have for supper. What to wear. What colour to paint my house, and on and on and on. What I don’t choose, and what I believe no one has the right to choose, is whether someone else gets to live or die. That is not a “choice” issue.

So, are all these defenders of abortion, pro-choice or pro-abortion?

Let’s examine the evidence. ARCC says in its press release that access to abortion is impeded because 9,000 women have to pay for their own abortions and only one-fifth of Canadian hospitals perform abortions. In addition, they complain many doctors are unwilling to do abortions and medical students are inadequately trained.

There are over 105,000 abortions every year in Canada and over 90% of them are fully paid for by taxpayers. The 9,000 women ARCC is talking about would have had abortions in private, for-profit clinics and even then, taxpayers would have picked up the tab for the physician fee and in some cases part of the facility fee, except in New Brunswick. It is the only province that doesn’t pay any of the cost of clinic abortions.

The group wants all taxpayers, including the over 60% of us who think there should be legal protection for unborn children, to pay for all abortions. It thinks every hospital in the country, most of which are already strapped for beds, doctors and nurses, should provide abortions. And, doctors and medical students should be performing them.

The day ARCC held its media event, the Fraser Institute reported that average wait times for health care services in Canada was 17 weeks. That includes services like diagnostics, cancer treatment and most other legitimate medical services. Women choosing abortions never wait 17 weeks. It’s true, many women, if they don’t live in a city, have to travel for the procedure but so do rural patients for just about any health service you can mention. Access to abortion is already better and faster than most other medical services in the country. And to top it off, private for-profit abortion clinics are paid for by governments in a country that declares private medicine to be un-Canadian.

All of this is evidence that ARCC and its supporters are, all denials to the contrary, pro-abortion. Abortion is to be the only declared medically necessary service which must be available in every hospital in the country and completely paid for by taxpayers.

The real clincher, however, came at the end of the radio interview. Dr. Megill was struggling to defend the claim that abortion was medically necessary even though it is celebrated as a choice. It cannot be both. If it is done because women choose it, it’s not legitimate medicine. “Abortion is no more elective than childbirth,” she said. “Elective abortion is just as legitimate as elective childbirth.”

Elective childbirth? Childbirth is the final stage of pregnancy. It’s what happens naturally and requires no “choice” or “election” on the part of the woman.

Dr. Megill apparently sees abortion as the equivalent to childbirth, an opinion, I would guess, that is not shared by about 99.99999% of Canadians. That, I think, clearly puts her and her pals in the category of “pro-abortion.”