For The Calgary Herald

Monday, January 28, 2008

Three cities in Canada, to date, have refused to allow abortion ads to be shown on city-owned transit shelters. Fredericton and Kelowna rejected them outright. The city of Hamilton, responding to three complaints by citizens and one city councillor who said he was "offended," removed the ads after they went up.
What did the ads say? They were part of a national campaign spearheaded by LifeCanada, a national educational pro-life group, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada decision that struck down all legal restrictions on abortion. The ads were sponsored by local pro-life groups.
At this point, many, having read the "pro-life" tag, are picturing bloody, aborted babies and preachy moralistic slogans.
In fact, the ads, which you can see at www.AbortionInCanada.ca, feature a photo of a pregnant woman and the words (with slight variations in some locations), "9 months. The length of time abortion is allowed in Canada. No medical reason needed. Abortion: Have we gone too far?"
Sound offensive to you? If so, what is it, specifically, that bothers you?
It can't be the image of the pregnant woman. If it is the statement of fact that abortion is legal throughout all nine months of pregnancy and that a woman does not need a medical reason to have one, you should be on my side.
Maybe you don't think anyone should be allowed to question Canada's current policy on abortion. Or do you resent that we are drawing attention to it? As long as Canadians are unaware, we can maintain the pretence that we've reached an acceptable compromise, or "social peace" on abortion.
In the reactions I've heard both in the media and at our office, people say the ads aren't true or they mislead. People don't believe that women can get abortions, especially late-term abortions, without having a life-threatening or serious medical condition. Many don't believe second and third trimester abortions happen at all, and most don't know that almost all abortions in this country, over 100,000 a year, are paid for by taxpayers through the publicly funded health-care system.
Here are the facts:
There is no law restricting abortion at any stage of pregnancy. An unborn baby is not considered a human being under the law until he or she is outside the mother's body. Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons in each province can impose guidelines about when abortions should be performed, but they are not laws and most of them don't require a medical reason.
We don't know for sure how many late-term abortions are performed because when the court struck down the law in 1988, it also removed reporting requirements so that detailed information is not available for about two-thirds of the abortions performed. With that limited database, Statistics Canada figures show that in 2004, there were 4,880 second and third trimester abortions, including 401 abortions after 20 weeks, the point of viability according to the Canadian Medical Association. There were 45 third trimester abortions that year, including five after 33 weeks' gestation. If detailed information was available for all abortions, the actual numbers could be three times higher.
Critics of the ads say, "That's misleading. You don't know the situation of the women having those abortions. They could have serious, life-threatening health problems." Perhaps they do, but why don't we have the evidence?
We have no basis to assume that's the reason for the hundreds of abortions after the point of viability.
In fact, two years ago in the Calgary Herald, Dr. Margaret Somerville, a bioethicist at McGill University, related two instances in which she was consulted by doctors about post-32 week abortions on healthy women. One was for a graduate student who was afraid to tell her parents she was pregnant and the other was a married woman who had been told her child had a cleft palate, a correctable impediment, and she did not want a "defective" child. Dr. Somerville said, "The physicians who called me believed that was unethical, but were unsure how to handle the situation." That is, under the law, they had no reason to refuse to perform an abortion.
That is where an unlimited, unrestricted "woman's right to choose" has brought us.
That leads me back to the LifeCanada ad campaign and the question: "Abortion: Have we gone too far?" I'd say yes, and I invite others to get informed and then join the debate.
Joanne Byfield is president of LifeCanada/VieCanada and the acting executive director of Alberta Pro-Life