The third in a continuing series of pro-life Members of Parliament
John Reimer is a native of Kitchener, Ontario, and before his political career was an educator and member of the Waterloo Country Board of Education and the Board of Governors of Wilfred Laurier University. He has served one previous term in the House of Commons during the 1979-80 session. He was elected again in 1984. he is married and has two children.
Mr. Reimer served on the Kitchener-Waterloo Hospital Commission, and in 1976 prepared an extensive paper on abortion of the Commission in which he concluded that the hospital should restrict its abortion practices to eliminate abortions for socio-economic reasons and should allow abortion only in cases of a direct threat to life or serious impairment to physical health in compliance with the Criminal Code.
His position at present is that, “. . . anyone who studies the facts on abortion and does so to the best of their ability can have only one answer – that life begins with conception, and that intellectual and moral honesty requires that that person must oppose all abortion, save in those rare cases when the life of the mother is in danger.”
His Private Members’ Bill, C-216, reflects this view, as it amends the Section 251 of the Criminal Code to remove the word “health’ as grounds for abortion leaving only endangerment to the pregnant women’s life. It further defines this endangerment as not including social, mental or economic conditions. This Bill has recently been chosen for debate in the House of Commons.
John Reimer is a member of the Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast group and as a member of the Mennonite Brethren is not ashamed to admit his opposition to abortion stems from his adherence to Judeo-Christian moral values.
In November 1984, Reimer issued a joint press release with John Sweeney, MPP for Kitchener riding, in which both condemned the “lawlessness” of the Morgentaler abortuary, and called upon the federal and provincial governments to prevent Morgentaler from further “defying the law.”
He has spoken out against abortion many times during Parliamentary debates, most recently on Mitges’ Motion, when he stated, “is the unborn a potential human being, or a human being with potential? . . . It is my contention that the foetus is, from conception a human being with potential.”
