Toronto March for Life“Abortion access grim in English Canada,” warns the headline of a November 20 article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The grimness being referred to here, however, is not the macabre spectre of dismembered Canadian fetuses in clinic dumpsters. It is, according to a fairly new report on abortion access in Canada, about the apparently alarming lack of such clinics and their accompanying dumpsters in certain areas of Canada. After reading through the report, a few observations:
Over half of Canada’s abortion clinics are in Quebec.
Researchers reported earlier this year that “more than one in 10 women at the University of Quebec at Montreal have had at least one abortion”—and “of those who had an abortion, about 16% admitted to doing it twice, 7.1% had three and 4.4% have aborted four or more times.” At least 12.5% of student admitted they had had an abortion. Quebec, once a staunchly Catholic province, is overwhelmingly pro-choice, with an estimated one quarter of all pregnancies ending in abortion.
This isn’t surprising, although it is depressing. I’ve travelled through Quebec, and while the vestiges of its Christian history remains, they are now most often tourist sites rather than a cultural barometer. And although CCBR has never done any pro-life work in Quebec, a 2012 presentation I did in Ottawa was protested by the Montreal student rioters, who drove all the way up to Ottawa to riot bi-lingually outside the church. An enormous amount of work would have to be done in Quebec to start rebuilding the pro-life consensus there.
Again, the pro-abortion medical establishment paints fewer abortions as a problem
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: Nothing quite proves that the abortion crowd is pro-abortion rather than pro-“choice” like seeing what they consider to be a problem. There are no back-alley abortion deaths in Canada, or any of the other dire consequences that a lack of abortion access will result in according to the hysterical abortion activists. Yet, these people look at areas with lower abortion rates and see a problem to be fixed. If only there were more abortion clinics, they muse, we could raise the abortion rate and chop the pregnancy rate here quite nicely.
Suddenly, they’re admitting that second-trimester abortions could have consequences
The abortion activists in Canada and abroad are forever trying to contradict the basic scientific fact that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction by claiming that abortion has no complications, and is an extraordinarily mundane and exquisitely safe procedure. That is, unless they happen to be making the case for a new abortion drug, in which case they change their tune. Not having an abortion clinic in your back yard, says Dr. Wendy Norman, could mean “waiting longer and travelling farther for basic reproductive care, which in turn puts them at a higher risk of having a second trimester abortion and its associated complications.” Risk? Complications? Those words have been on the pro-abortion blacklist for decades. It turns out that only when lobbying for dangerous new pills are they willing to admit that such things exist in relation to abortion.
Abortion activists still aren’t telling the truth about RU-486
The oft-trumpeted solution to the problem of fewer abortions, as usual, is the abortion drug RU-486, which the report says is “the gold standard for inducing safe and early non-surgical abortion.”
But as LifeSiteNews reported some time ago: “FDA website and particularly the Mifepristone US Post-marketing Adverse Events Summary through 04/30/2011…noted that of the 2207 adverse events listed, 612 women were hospitalized, 339 experienced blood loss that required transfusions, 256 had infections, pelvic inflammatory disease, endometriosis, pelvic infections with sepsis, with 48 being severe, hospitalized for 2-3 days. Fifty-eight women had ectopic pregnancies. Several of the women (7 of 14) who died in the US, ‘died from sepsis (severe illness caused by infection of the bloodstream) after medical abortion with mifepristone and misoprostol…Sepsis is a known risk related to any type of abortion.’”
If that’s a “gold standard,” I think we all just learned something about the abortion industry.
