Vice reporter Sarah Ratchford prepares to go undercover posing as a woman seeking an abortion at a crisis pregnancy centre.
A documentary by the online magazine Vice Canada claims it is difficult for women to obtain abortions in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. The 33-minute video, titled, “Abortion Access in the Maritimes,” and available free online, bills itself as an investigative report by Sarah Ratchford, but it appears to peddle the lines of abortion activists in claiming that women in much of Atlantic Canada have difficulty accessing abortion.
Ratchford said the “conservative political climates” of PEI and NB lead to restrictions on abortion in the two provinces. There are no abortion mills or hospitals that do abortions on the Island, which pays for women’s abortions in Halifax and, beginning this summer, New Brunswick. Ratchford presents several pro-abortion activists who complain that travelling off the island increases costs and prevents women from having abortions.
In New Brunswick, abortion is not covered by provincial insurance if committed in private abortuaries, although they are available in state-run hospitals. Late last year, Brian Gallant’s Liberal government announced they would expand abortion services in the province to beyond the pair of hospitals that currently carry out the procedure.
According to the Canadian Institute of Health Research there were 1036 abortions committed in New Brunswick in 2013, the last year for which statistics are available.
Ratchford characterized abortion in New Brunswick as “scarce” with women doing “DIY abortions” — do it yourself abortions. She said it was more difficult for women in the province to access abortion after the Morgentaler abortuary closed in the summer of 2014, without reporting that it has since re-opened under a new name.
She also said only “privileged” women can afford to travel to abortion facilities or afford the $700-850 abortion fee at a private abortion facility.
Ratchford then went undercover to the Women’s Care Center, a Fredericton crisis pregnancy center, which she said misrepresents themselves are reproductive care offices that provide the full range of services pregnant women might want, in order to “illustrate what women face … when they need to access abortions.” But in the first question the documentary shows, the unidentified crisis worker says they do not do abortions. They provide information about fetal development and support to mothers.
The undercover reporter pressed repeatedly for an abortion or abortion referral, but the WCC staff try to talk her out of killing her unborn child. Ratchford presents this as judgemental harassment.
Against a backdrop of the provincial March for Life in Fredericton with both pro-life and pro-abortion demonstrators, and speeches on each side, the documentary suggests a heated debate on abortion which results in a denial of abortion to Maritime women. Ratchford goes as far to say women are threatened by violence or death if they enter the abortion mill, but does not provide any evidence of such threats.
In the final third of the video, Ratchford talked to Kandace Hagen, an abortion activist, who provides women in PEI with under-the-counter chemical abortions by providing a cocktail made up of Misoprostol and Methotrexate, the two drugs that make up the abortion pill RU-486. Ratchford admitted that such abortions can “go awry” but said it is the only choice women in rural PEI have if they want to terminate their pregnancy by killing their unborn baby.
The documentary was largely ignored by the mainstream media with a single article on Huffington Post giving it any coverage.
