Paper also promotes Stephen Lewis, abortion, condom advocate
The Globe and Mail habitually promotes abortionist Henry Morgentaler
Abortionist Henry Morgentaler was featured on Oct. 26 in a Globe and Mail series celebrating Canadians who made a difference. The Report on Business section’s 11-week “25 making a difference” series presented “transformational Canadians” in “the fields of business, science and technology, the environment, education, health care and community.” The series also includes environmental activists, politicians, business leaders, and philanthropists such as David Suzuki, Paul Martin, Jim Balsillie, and Craig Kielburger.
“Canadian women enjoy the right to safe and legal abortions largely because Henry Morgentaler fought a long battle on their behalf,” writes Nick Rockel in the article. He mentions how the “unflappable” Morgentaler was willing to face trial, prison, and death threats because of his convictions.
To Mary Ellen Douglas, national organizer of Campaign Life Coalition, Morgentaler’s impact on Canada has been a “disaster.” She said, “thousands upon thousands of unborn lives have been taken” because of Morgentaler, who is “driven by money, not by compassion.” Morgentaler has indeed had an impact on modern Canada she conceded, though “he certainly shaped it in a negative way.”
Douglas notes, however, that the real fault with Canada’s abortion legacy lies with Pierre Trudeau and other pro-abortion politicians who legalized abortion in 1969. Morgentaler only took advantage of it. “We pray for him everyday,” said Douglas. “He needs to make a clear statement that this whole issue is one of taking human life.”
Douglas is not at all surprised that the Globe and Mail, “the most pro-abortion paper in Canada.” is promoting Morgentaler.
Morgentaler spent several months in jail in the mid-1970s for committing illegal abortions, prior to the 1988 Supreme Court case that abolished the need to have abortions approved by a hospital committee. His medical licence was suspended for a year by the Disciplinary Committee of the Professional Corporation of Physicians of Quebec in 1976 because he carried out illegal abortions and did so poorly. According to Catherine Dunphy’s mostly sycophantic biography on Morgentaler, the committee “commented on ‘an attitude which is primarily directed to protecting his fees … This committee is incapable of reconciling this behaviour with the humanitarian concern that the accused invoked throughout his defence’.” Although the findings of the committee were upheld, Morgentaler’s licence suspension was nullified after the justice minister intervened. Morgentaler was later accused of re-using hospital instruments and once again faced professional discipline.
The Globe and Mail has previously angered Canadian pro-lifers over a series of overtly pro-abortion articles that suggested Morgentaler should be named to the Order of Canada in 2003 – five years before eventually receiving the award. Globe columnist Heather Mallick, who now writes for the Toronto Star, then wrote numerous pro-Morgentaler columns including “Why doesn’t this man have the order of Canada?” (Jan. 18, 2005) and “Stuff ‘n’ nonsense about abortion” (Feb. 1, 2005). At about the same time, the editorial board of the paper claimed disagreements about abortion “are low on the radar. In the main, it seems, Canadians have come to a broad accommodation.” The majority of the letters to the editor it published afterwards were pro-abortion. Mallick later denounced three MPs from the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus who wrote a letter opposing these articles as “the Three Stooges” and “fools.” In 2005, The Interim also noted the Globe’s negative coverage of Christian involvement in politics that sparked outrage from social conservatives and Christians across Canada.
The Globe and Mail has also added Stephen Lewis to its list of transformational Canadians. Lewis, Canada’s former ambassador to the UN and former UN special envoy for fighting HIV/AIDS in Africa, is recognized as “a tireless champion of humanitarian causes” who “succeeded in drawing attention to the plight of AIDS victims worldwide”. The article does not mention Lewis’ long history of advocacy for abortion and condom use. In the 1960s, Lewis was the first elected politician to propose the legalization of abortion in Canada and, as leader of the Ontario NDP from 1970 to 1978, had an impact on the party’s strident support for abortion. At the 1994 Cairo conference on population and development, he railed against pro-lifers and the Catholic Church, who criticized the conference’s support for abortion and contraception.
While he was the UN special envoy to Africa from 2001 to 2006, Lewis was a strong proponent of condoms over abstinence and a harsh critic of the Bush administration’s pro-abstinence plan for AIDS relief. Even though Uganda’s anti-AIDS plan, which emphasized abstinence and fidelity, led to a ten per cent drop in the country’s HIV rate from 1990 to 2007, Lewis lamented the country’s “condom crisis,” by which he meant Uganda’s lack of condoms. In 2005, the director of the Global Centre for Uganda’s ABC Strategy that stressed abstinence, Martin Ssempa, called upon UN secretary-general Kofi Annan to fire Lewis. “Mr. Lewis is using the entire body of the UN for his personal agenda of condomizing the developing nations,” wrote Ssempa. “Why he has the audacity to fight the only nation which has demonstrated success in reducing HIV/AIDS is utterly beyond me.”
