By Faye Sonier
I’ve been an active pro-life advocate for years, and I don’t know when this historic event took place. However some days it seems that everyone else does.
Margaret Wente knows when the debate ended. A few weeks ago, she wrote
a Globe and Mail article on a Parliamentary motion seeking to condemn sex-selective abortions in which she stated that “anyone who believes this wasn’t an effort to reopen the broader abortion debate must also believe in the Easter Bunny.” Similarly, Member of Parliament Niki Ashton knows it happened. Again and again, she has spoken of the Conservative Party’s efforts to
“re-open the abortion debate.”
I can’t find any historical record that establishes “the day the abortion debate ended.” I would assume that pro-choice advocates would have held a rally and press conferences to celebrate the momentous event. Surely there would be pictures and videos. It would probably have its own Wikipedia entry. My searches have come up empty.
Did it end in 1988 when seven citizens who sat on the bench of the Supreme Court of Canada rendered their decision in the
Morgentaler case? A quick read of the decision indicates otherwise. The court only found the then existing abortion law unconstitutional because of limited access to the therapeutic abortion committees mandated by the legislation. The court then ruled that Parliament was free to draft a new and better law that would protect the child in the womb. The Supreme Court even proposed language to ensure that the new legislation would be constitutionally acceptable.
Did it end in 1991 after Bill C-43, a bill which would have recriminalized some abortions, passed in the House of Commons but died in the Senate after a dramatic tie vote? It seems not, as nearly every year since then bills or motions on the issue have been introduced by members of the Liberal, Reform, Alliance and Conservative parties. Political battles wage municipally, provincially and federally on matters like Bubble Zones, funding for abortion procedures and the publication of abortion statistics.
At no point have all Canadians agreed that abortion should be legal through all nine months of pregnancy for any and every reason, but that is our current legal reality. None of the polls I’ve reviewed have revealed such a consensus. The abortion related poll that lends itself closest to unanimity is a 2011 Environics poll which found that 92% of Canadians believe sex-selection abortions should be illegal.
And if the abortion debate had in fact ended, one would expect to see much less media coverage of the issue. However, a month doesn’t go by without at least one significant abortion-related story making the major dailies. The frequent reporting on abortion stories necessarily assumes that there’s a debate, or at least a tension, worth writing about.
The abortion debate has never closed, died or ended. To argue otherwise is to argue that those who want to rationally discuss the issue are to be marginalized as fringe elements of society; that the pro-life activists who came to Ottawa last year to march for life are 19,000 anomalies; and, that their perspective is inconsistent with some greater enshrined Canadian value of “choice.”
To contend that the abortion debate is over is to declare that there is consensus in Canada on an issue where no such consensus exists. In reality, it’s an intellectually lazy attempt at discrediting those who legitimately question the appropriateness of our nation being the only western country in the world that lacks abortion legislation.