If abortion was just another surgical procedure devoid of serious moral implications, it would not be cloaked in so much secrecy, would it? The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada has released an eReview on the “mess” surrounding Canada’s abortion numbers, pointing out there is no consistency in how free-standing abortion facilities report their numbers, if they do at all, and that British Columbia hides beyond its access to information laws any abortion-related information in that province. Former Interim columnist Ted Gerk runs the Stop Abortion Censorship website to highlight the problem. I was once part of a strategy meeting that examined how to get the province of Ontario to maintain records of post-abortion complications like they do every other surgical procedure. (Ontario still does not record medical follow-up for abortion.)
As the IMFC’s Andrea Mrozek points out, “the bottom line is that Canadians can’t conclusively know” how many abortions are being committed in Canada. In what other public policy issue — or for that matter, in what other area of life — is ignorance of the facts considering a good thing? How do we get to a reality-based policy, as the Left likes to say, if we have no idea about the reality of the scope of abortion in Canada? You would think that abortion advocates would want reliable data on which to base their advocacy, but apparently they don’t. Whose interests are served by the public’s blissful ignorance of how many abortions are being carried out and what the aftermath of those approximately 100,000 surgical abortions might be? The country might recoil if it knew how common abortion is and how many women need further care because of the phyical harm abortion causes them — and what all this costs taxpayers.
