“Prospects called grim for groups fighting abortion,” bannered a Globe and Mail headline following the defeat of Bill-43.
“They gave it the good fight, and they lost,” said Jack London, a Manitoba law professor.
Fade away
Professor Bernard Dickens of Toronto agreed, saying that the abortion controversy will gradually fade away.  He predicted a series of harassments of doctors performing abortions, and further court actions by husbands or boyfriends of women intending to have abortions, but “their legal prospects are grim,” he said.
After the federal law was struck down in 1988, London observed, there was a flurry of provincial laws and court actions aiming to restrict abortion, but most of these failed, and most Canadians have got used to the absence of a law.   “We haven’t criminalized abortion and the country remains fully intact,” he added.  “Our daily lives have not been affected.”  Similar opinions may be found in our survey of editorials from coast to coast in the centre pages of this issue.
These comments, to our mind, represent the height of callousness.
Democracy
First, losing the battle for a just abortion law is not like losing a football game; it is not enough to say, ‘They gave it the good fight, and they lost.’  As we have shown again and again, democracy rests on respect for the life of the individual; when the state’s protection is taken away from one class of human beings, why not from others?
Why not infanticide?
Why not euthanasia?
Second, a country in which approximately 80,000 babies are destroyed each year does not remain “fully intact.”  Our daily lives have been affected, and for the worse.
Both of these law professors, well known for their pro-abortion stand, ignore the fact that the large majority of supporters also rejected Bill C-43.  Pro-lifers rejected this Bill because it was based on lies and hypocrisy.  In its preamble it paid lip-service to the principle that the child in the womb deserves protection; in its provisions it took away that protection.
As Justice Minister Kim Campbell insisted over and over again, it was highly unlikely that any doctor would ever be convicted of a criminal offense under this bill, because it was constructed in such a way as to eliminate the possibility of successful prosecution.
Victory for truth
The defeat of the bill was a victory for truth, over against the lie that the bill was a moderate piece of legislation for a moderate country, the lie that it represented a reasonable balance between the rights of the mother and the rights of the fetus, the lie that is successfully fulfilled what the Supreme Court said was a legitimate legislative objective – protection for the unborn child.
After three years of near-constant warfare, said the legal experts consulted by the Globe, the conflict will now subside into low-level skirmishing.
They could not be further from the truth.
Indeed, we promise to campaign relentlessly for truth itself.  We intend to continue to expose all the lies used in support of abortion, euthanasia and all the other forms of anti-family, anti-life activities currently fashionable.