On Feb. 1st, a nurse at a Montreal hospital reached out to a pro-life group on Facebook; she was distressed about an upcoming procedure that had been scheduled for the next day: “A 38-week abortion, is that still called an abortion?” The question is worth considering, since it offers a snapshot of the landscape of the abortion issue in Canada in 2023.
While we have been saturated with pro-abortion propaganda in this country for decades, the tone of this sustained campaign of misinformation shifted with the rise of Justin Trudeau. During his tenure as the leader of the Liberals, Trudeau has engaged in some truly reprehensible demagoguery on this topic: the putative “right” to murder unborn children has been outrageously conflated with “Canadian values,” so that loyalty to the nation has been placed in tension with any advocacy on behalf of the unborn. Canadian discourse has been so polluted by toxic rhetoric of this kind that any opposition to abortion usually comes at a high personal, professional, or political cost.
The great irony, of course, is that Canada has one of the most permissive legal abortion regimes on the planet. Not having any law on the books whatsoever, our unborn fellow citizens occupy a perilous legal limbo in which they have, at best, the status of property—a lamentable, abhorrent gray area of the law that has persisted for over 50 years. Why, then, would Trudeau step up his rhetorical attacks on pro-life Canadians if the status quo on the question of abortion was so congenial to him and so (seemingly) unassailable?
For the pro-life movement in Canada, the most substantial victory of which it can boast, in the last half-century, is its continued existence; there have been very few legal or cultural “wins” and our sheer dogged determination to advocate for the unborn is what, instead, has sustained our cause. Things can sometimes seem hopeless to us, and the obstacles to any legal protection of the unborn can, likewise, appear to be insurmountable. But if the situation really were hopeless, the opposition of our adversaries would be pointless. Instead, attacks on the pro-life movement — efforts to undermine and de-legitimize our efforts — have only increased with time.
We submit that the reason for this escalation is a sneaking sense of desperation. And, to return to the nurse’s alarmed question—“A 38-week abortion, is that still called an abortion?”—we can see precisely why the proponents of abortion have good reason to be afraid: the prima facia outrage and alarm that the murder of a 38-week-old baby occasioned (and, sadly, the baby was, indeed, aborted) points to the inability of the current legal climate in Canada to endure. The lie that the “abortion” of a full-term baby is anything but infanticide is not plausible in the age of ultrasounds and advanced neonatal (and prenatal) care. The defenders of abortion demand fealty to a fiction against which reason, conscience, and common-sense recoil.
It is past time, then, that we honor the instincts of the nurse who was so disturbed by what, in Canada, remains legal: the murder of innocent children up until the very moment of birth itself. We therefore join with the president of Campaign Life Coalition, Jeff Gunnarson, in calling on Canada’s political leaders to pass legislation protecting children in the womb. We will have, as a nation, no defense from the sober judgement of the future when it concludes that our times were uniquely evil, cowardly, and depraved. As former abortionist Dr. Bernard Nathanson said in press conference in Toronto in 1983, “Because of abortion, future historians will judge this society the most brutal in the history of mankind.”
We can only continue to state the obvious and do our utmost to bring these dark times to an end.
