Josie Luetke:
I derive a perverse satisfaction from horrifying Americans with tales of Canada’s death spiral. I asked one, “Did you know we are considering euthanizing babies here? Like ones with severe deformities or disabilities,” when I realized we already do that.
Canada doesn’t directly report on the reasons women procure abortions, but we know as we better diagnose congenital conditions in the womb with advances in technology, more mothers are aborting later in pregnancy.
A 2024 study in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology examined 13,777 abortions between 15 and 29 weeks of gestation committed over a 32-year period in Quebec. Researchers found that the number “indicated” by fetal anomalies doubled between 1989-2000 and 2011-2021, reaching 2834 (or 66.8 per cent of abortions at that gestation) during the latter period.
Not included in that count would be an abortion that took place in 2016 at 35 weeks at an unnamed hospital in the province. Earlier, at 30 weeks, McGill University Health Centre had denied the mother’s request for an abortion, because it didn’t find that the fetus’ abnormalities met Quebec’s College of Physicians’ threshold of “serious congenital anomalies” or “exceptional clinical situations” for abortions at that stage. When the story broke, the response was not “This can never happen again.” Quebec Health Minister Gaétan Barrette falsely asserted: “Legally, every woman — and it’s a Supreme Court decision — has a right to an abortion at anytime before she gives birth.” Dr. Yves Robert, secretary of the college, said it would update its guidelines “to ensure this procedure is available . . . and that women would have access to it without real problems.”
A different article, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal this year, attributed Canada’s “artificially high and rising stillbirth rate” to the inclusion of late-term abortions, mentioning “widespread uptake of prenatal diagnosis and pregnancy termination for serious congenital anomalies.” Babies delivered dead at a weight of at least 500 grams or whose mothers were at a gestational age of at least 20 weeks are recorded as stillbirths here, regardless of whether or not the deaths are intended.
As blogger Patricia Maloney learned from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, 1,192 babies were recorded as “stillbirth from termination of pregnancy” (i.e. abortion) in the 2023-2024 fiscal year. That figure doesn’t include Quebec. She discovered an additional 150 babies were delivered alive after 20 weeks of gestation and subsequently left to die that year.
In The National Post’s article, “‘Ultrasound’s ‘traumatic’ spinoff: ‘Accidental’ live births after late-term abortions due to birth defects,” University of British Columbia professor Dr. K.S. Joseph explains that prenatal screening results arrive around the 20th week. If they’re “unfavourable,” some parents will choose to abort—either through a dilation and evacuation procedure (which goes unmentioned) or the early induction of labour, which may or may not entail effecting fetal demise first (through the injection of a lethal substance like potassium chloride or digoxin). As not all parents are keen on or even offered feticide (especially if they’re being told their child is “incompatible with life”), some babies are born alive and supposedly kept comfortable until they pass away.
Perhaps this practice could be considered passive euthanasia, as life-sustaining care is withheld, except the premature induction of labour is very much an active intervention, without which the baby may have had a significantly greater chance of survival.
To be clear, some babies with congenital anomalies will die, and it can be ethical simply to provide them palliative care and not pursue burdensome and likely hopeless treatment. It is unjust to deliberately shorten their lives, however, especially for eugenic reasons.
All that is to say, hundreds of babies are being killed due to disability every year in Canada, some dying after they have “completely proceeded, in a living state, from the bod(ies) of (their) mother(s),” and legally become human beings, entitled to Criminal Code protections.
When, in 2013, three Conservative MPs accordingly requested the RCMP investigate babies who survived abortions but subsequently died, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper commented, “abortion is legal in Canada.”
Skipping ahead, to 2022, the Quebec College of Physicians makes an appearance again, before Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying (“MAiD”). Representing the college, Dr. Louis Roy casually suggested legalizing infanticide for “babies from birth to one year of age who come into the world with severe deformities and very serious syndromes for which the chances of survival are virtually nil, and which will cause so much pain that a decision must be made to not allow the child to suffer.” He mentioned the Netherlands, whose Groningen Protocol permits medical professionals to kill with impunity infants under age one who are perceived to be suffering unbearably.
The outrage was immediate. Then Minister of Disability Inclusion Carla Qualtrough said, “I find that completely shocking and unacceptable. I would never support going down that road.” Krista Carr, executive vice president for Inclusion Canada, a national federation for the intellectually disabled, stated: “Canada cannot begin killing babies when doctors predict there is no hope for them. Predictions are far too often based on discriminatory assumptions about life with a disability.” She added, “providing MAiD to a person who cannot consent is a standard that is wildly dangerous for all persons with intellectual disabilities in Canada.”
Was Roy’s proposal really that outrageous, though?
The gold standard of morality these days— “consent”—is already being chipped away. Quebec, the usual culprit, is, with the Canadian government’s effective condonation, euthanizing patients who have lost the capacity to consent if they made an advanced request. A woman in her 80s, a “Mrs. B.,” was euthanized recently in Ontario at her husband’s insistence, despite seemingly changing her mind.
More pertinently, pre-born babies certainly cannot consent to being killed. Is there that much difference between a pre-born baby at 35 weeks and one born full-term, at 39 weeks? Or, for that matter, a pre-born baby at 35 weeks and a baby born premature at 35 weeks?
To underscore the double standard: The aforementioned Quebec mother who aborted at that gestation said, “I didn’t want my child to suffer their whole life.” It was only the child’s opportune location—still inside her—that prevented that fate. It was only the child’s lack of (legal) personhood that allowed for a “death with dignity” instead of a life of difficulty, which runs contrary to everything euthanasia advocates would have you believe about the entitlements of personhood.
Even earlier in pregnancy, at 20 weeks, the fetus is sucking his or her thumb, kicking, punching, hiccupping, swallowing, sleeping, reacting to light, and hearing noises. Evidence suggests he or she could possibly feel pain (though the babies killed at this gestation are not always anesthetized).
Even at 15 weeks, all the major organs and body parts are present. He or she responds to taste and touch. His or her heart has already beat nearly 16 million times.
The humanization of these babies hasn’t stayed the abortionist’s hand.
In recognition that a fetus and a newborn really do not differ all that substantially, multiple prominent “pro-choice” philosophers have defended infanticide. In a postscript to her article “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” Mary Anne Warren wrote, “neither abortion nor the killing of neonates is properly considered a form of murder.” In Practical Ethics, Peter Singer wrote, “A week-old baby is not a rational and self-aware being . . . If, for the reasons I have given, the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either.”
I applaud them for their consistency. Most everyone else seems stuck in the iron grip of cognitive dissonance—harming a baby is appalling to them, at least until someone utters the magic word “abortion.”
If I were an optimist, I might hope that serious proposals of infanticide may serve as a wake-up call to the impervious Canadian populace. I am not.
Instead, I wonder how long it will be before the rigorous safeguards for “fourth-trimester abortions” are weathered down to the same “standards” for second- and third-trimester abortions. If we abort because of cleft palate (and we do), then why not after birth too? Will we chase down the errant child with Down Syndrome who slipped under the radar?
Quit your pearl-clutching. Spare me the theatrics. We already kill babies; let’s not pretend at principles.
