Last week's revelations about Canadian women being sent to the U.S. for late-term abortions got a little bit of media coverage. Several newspapers across the country ran the story. The longest one was under 400 words. Nigel Hannaford of the Calgary Herald wrote a good column on the story. Oddly, no letters to the editor have appeared in any of the major Alberta newspapers in the wake of this story. Notice, I said appeared. I know of at least one letter that was sent to the Calgary Herald and as of this writing, Thursday night, the letter has not been published. I suspect more were sent in. The story that ran last week mentioned that the Quebec government was looking for a doctor who would perform late-term abortions so that women would not have to go to the States. A spokesman for the Quebec government said the province sends about 30 women a year for these post 24-week abortions. Henry Morgentaler was quoted as saying about 15 Ontario women go every year. (Morgentaler, who operates six abortion clinics across the country, says he has "ethical problems" with such late abortions. Even he recognizes that they are babies at that stage.) A B.C. health official said a "handful" of women are sent each week from that province. However, Barbara McAdorey, editor of LifeCanada News, phoned the Ontario Health department to confirm the number of women sent from Ontario. In fact, in 2003-2004 fiscal year, Ontario taxpayers paid to send 56 women to the U.S. for late-term abortions. The Ontario government defines these as over 20 weeks' gestation. The cost for these abortions? A cool $398,000. That's a lot of health care money. If we combine the 56 from Ontario, the 30 from Quebec and an estimate of three per week from B.C., that's close to 250 Canadian babies aborted in the U.S. each year paid for by taxpayers. There are also at least a few thousand late-term abortions done in Canada each year. These are induction abortions, that is, the mom is given a drug to induce labour and the baby is "born". If the mom and doctor are lucky, the baby is dead. Sometimes, however, the baby, tiny and premature, survives the "termination" and emerges alive and struggling to breathe. As we learned several years ago, most hospitals allow these babies to die without any intervention. No oxygen, no food, no water. Calgary's Foothills Hospital had just such an experience in 1998. One of its "terminations" occurred at 35 weeks and according to nurses at the hospital, the baby struggled for 12 hours before he finally died. In 2000, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta changed its guidelines to allow doctors to inject the baby with potassium chloride to ensure no live birth would result. So, why do Canadian women have to go to the States when there are late-term abortions done in Canada? My guess is that we send them stateside because not all jurisdictions allow "feticide" which is what the Alberta pre-killing procedure is called in the guidelines. No one likes to risk the born alive baby when everyone was expecting a dead one. In the U.S., there are doctors and clinics that specialize in partial-birth abortions. Like feticide, these abortions ensure the baby is dead. The doctor delivers the baby feet first, and when the whole body except the head is outside of the mother's body, he or she reaches in and punctures the baby's head at the base, collapses the skull and sucks out the contents of the brain. Babies don't survive this grisly torture. I know that in the mid-nineties, an official with Alberta Health told a reporter in a taped interview that Alberta had in the past sent women to the States for late-term abortions because the doctors down there were so experienced in this procedure, unlike our homegrown doctors. Proponents of partial-birth abortion like to say that it is done to save the mother's life or that it's only done when the baby has such a severe abnormality it could never survive. It's rare, they say, only a few hundred a year in the U.S. (With at least 250 a year coming from Canada, that seems unlikely.) In fact during the partial birth abortion debate in the U.S. Congress in 1995 these excuses were all proven false. A 1998 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Dr. Leroy Sprang and Dr. Mark Neerhof pointed out that late-term abortionists themselves admitted to performing thousands of the procedures each year. They also said that only a fraction of the late abortions were done for medical or genetic reasons. They classified most of them as "elective." One physician told Congress that of the 2,000 partial birth abortions he had performed, about 9% were for maternal health indications, usually depression. Over half were for fetal flaws that "included many non-lethal disorders, some a minor as a cleft lip." In a later congressional debate, it was reported that the State of Kansas, the only state that requires reporting on partial-birth abortion, said that in 1998, there were 182 such abortions performed and every one of them were done for the mother's mental health. The babies were all viable with no health or genetic problems. I don't know anything about the 250 or so Canadian women and their babies who went to the States. I don't know if the mothers had serious medical problems. I don't know if the babies had severe genetic defects although the medical types always describe them that way. I'd be astonished if our late-termers were significantly different from those in the U.S. The only thing I know for certain is that 500 Canadians went to the States and only half of them returned.
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