So I saw Paul Tuns’ link to Justin Trudeau’s speech last week on “Canadian Liberty” and the Liberal Leader was conspicuous, as he usually is, in talking about liberty or Charter values, without being specific. Liberty is just this thing he invokes, because Liberals need to be about Liberty, he says. There is an exception to his lack of specificity, and that’s abortion. Justin Trudeau thinks that abortion is a really good thing. In fact, Justin Trudeau believes in abortion so much that Liberal MPs and candidates for the Liberal Party cannot even hold pro-life views. He has doubled down on abortion so often now, that it is hard to become more pro-abortion, but somehow he managed it last Tuesday night:
The instructive point here is obvious, but often overlooked. One set of policies in post-war Canada generated more liberty for more people than any other. It was the decades-long effort of the women’s movement to gain control over reproductive health and rights.
Indeed, let me be perfectly clear on this point. The Canada we know today is unimaginable without widely available birth-control and the legalization of choice.
Every conceivable measure of inclusion and progress has moved in the right direction since women gained legally protected reproductive freedom in Canada. From workforce participation to educational attainment to representation in the corridors of economic and political power.
In other words, abortion is the good thing from which all other good things come. If all that is good in Canada emanates from the abortion license — and its cousin, birth control — then the legalizing of abortion under Trudeau’s father Pierre in 1969, must be its greatest achievement.
Canada might be a pro-choice country, but it is unlikely that the general public is as enthusiastic about abortion as is the Liberal Leader. In the 1990s Bill and Hillary Clinton gave lip service to the political divide that exists on abortion, saying the procedure should be safe, legal, and rare. That was mere rhetoric because the Clinton presidency stood in the way of any restriction including partial-birth abortion, but at least the Clintons didn’t go on about how great defending a broad abortion license was for the country.
