Norman Spector in the Globe and Mail this morning:
Perusing my morning read, I read that Premier Jean Charest has told The Globe and Mail that “abortion is an inalienable right.”
That would be the same Jean Charest, by the way, who as an MP voted in favour of the Mulroney government’s abortion law that would have restricted this supposedly inalienable right.
I would add that there is nothing mutually exclusive about inalienable rights and restrictionsplaced on those rights. Spector is engaged in some silly point-scoring against Charest with his blog post.
More troublesome, however, is the implication by Spector that C-43, the Mulroney abortion bill, placed serious restrictions on abortion. The analysis from pro-lifers at the time was that the health of the mother exception (which included psychological and emotional health) was a loophole you could push 100,000 dead babies through. C-43, was opposed by most pro-life organizations and leaders at the time; see this story* which has a media round-up of reaction to the bill’s defeat in 1993 and this editorial which explains that C-43 was a pro-abortion bill. At the time, The Interim described C-43 not as a restriction on abortion but the re-legalization of the procedure.
* The humorous headline is missing a comma.
