On October 31, 1991 (Halowe’en), Dawn Black (NDP, New Westminster-Burnaby, B.C.) introduced a Private Member’s Bill in the House of Commons in favour of funding for birth control.

Pro-lifers have been saying for years that the contraceptive mentality increases rather than decreases abortions and the dissolution of the family, but feminists and others won’t listen.

Dawn Black’s bill proposed to reinstate a Family Planning division in the Department of Health and Welfare, restore full funding for Planned Parenthood, establish a national clearing house on family planning, and increase research on birth control methods.

Contending that half of grade eleven students have intercourse, Miss Black blamed sheltering teens from information about contraception for unwanted pregnancies, fear, shame, abortion, or single parenthood spent in poverty.

One in six Canadian teenagers will face such problems, she maintained, and the government is to blame for their mot being well enough informed about family planning.

“They think that condoms are foolproof,” she stated.  “They do not know that condoms fail 12 per cent of the time.”  (The failure rate is closer to 20 per cent in normal use; three times that in homosexual use; while condoms are of no use against STD’s or AIDS. Editor)

Sympathy

NDP policies show the utmost sympathy for girls who become pregnant, but none for the babies they might abort.

Ms. Black, for example, hoped that the ‘abortion pill,’ RU-486, would be allowed in Canada as soon as possible, if it was found to be safe.

“They are discovering now,” she claimed, “that it may be effective treatment for a type of infertility that women suffer as well.”  This is a claim which has been refuted as without a shred of evidence.

In the course of her speech, MP Black took a swipe at the enormously successful counseling service, Birthright.

“It draws in young women with a promise of pregnancy test and confidential counseling,” she said, “and then inundates them with anti-abortion propaganda.”  “Not giving people information about reproductive health,” she declared, “leads not to abstinence, but to unwanted pregnancy and abortion.”

Mary Clancy

Miss Black received fervent support from Mary Clancy (Liberal, Halifax).  Mrs. Clancy, speaking “as a Catholic,” blamed religion (i.e. Catholicism), for the unhappy statistics on AIDS, STD’s and teenage pregnancies.

She also looked to education to overcome “our Victorian mindset.”

As for abortion, she reiterated her old position that it is a woman’s right while trying to blame the government for its supposed necessity:
“There is not a woman in this House, I doubt in this country, I doubt a woman in this world, who is in favour of abortion,” she said, “…[but] for a number of women it is the only option and it is the only option because governments have not acted,” she added.

On the government side, parliamentary secretary Lise Bourgault (PC, Argenteuil-Papineau) praised the speaker for her call for massive state-funded sex-education.  However, while 100 per cent behind her she regretfully pointed out that family planning was a provincial concern, not a federal one.

That had been made clear, she said, by the provincial health ministers in 1977.

Research programs

Bill Attewell (PC< Markham) also agreed with Dawn Black that state-funded birth control would do wonders to combat “sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.”

He then referred to and explained various government research projects on “reproductive technologies” and “reproductive health” now underway or coming on stream.

Mr. Attewell pointed out that the federal government spent $3.7 million over the last eight years funding family planning projects through the National Health Research and Development Program (NHRDP) and had allocated another $1.5 million to them in 1990 for the next three years.

Among the other speakers in the debate, Jack Wittaker (NDP, Okanagan, B.C.), offered the view that “everybody on all sides of the House, and I believe anybody within Canada, would see the good sense” of supporting Dawn Black’s motion.  He, too, spoke of “unwanted” pregnancies and the need for women therefore to have the “option” of an abortion.

Finally, Mr. Jean-Marc Robitaille (PC, Terrebonne) having only two minutes to speak, found time to congratulate the mover of the motion and to assure her that the government has “a lot” of research projects under way.  (Hansard, October 31, 1991)

This bill should be defeated at the earliest possible moment.  Campaign Life Coalition representatives in Ottawa have begun to inform MPs about this latest anti-life proposal.

Historical footnote

In March 1977, following the completion of the Badgley Report, then Liberal Health Minister Marc Lalonde had announced a change in federal policy from passive collection of information to an active federal role in promoting sex education and women’s health and abortion clinics.

This passive role dated from the late sixties when birth control, abortion and homosexuality were legalized on the grounds that they were a private matter, of concern only to the person(s) involved.

But, as it turned out, their promoters never intended to keep it that way.

When they thought that people had forgotten the original arguments, proponents of family planning pushed for full state funding and intervention on the federal level, having already achieved partial victories on the provincial level in Ontario and Quebec.

In the provinces from the very beginning, governments funded birth control clinics, Planned Parenthood (PP) affiliates, and promoted the PP philosophy in public schools through Public Health Nurses and health legislation.

Lalonde reversed his March 1977 announcement because of loud pro-life protests and the above-mentioned provincial sensibilities.

Subsidies to PP from Health and Welfare were gradually reduced (but Canadian subsidies for the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), steadily rose in the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) budget to the over $6 million it currently receives each year.

Under the Conservative government, the family planning division in the Department of Health and Welfare was closed in 1985.  Its personnel consisted almost exclusively of PP supporters.