Canada really needs a new abortion law
As an unabashed pro-choice Quebecer, whose province was an early home to unfettered abortion access, gay rights activism and assisted suicide, among other bugaboos of the social conservative movement, let me say this: The Campaign Life Coalition finally got something right.
Last week at the Conservative convention in Halifax, supporters of Canada’s largest antiabortion group introduced a motion that would have struck down the party’s pledge to “not support any legislation to regulate abortion.” It was narrowly defeated, by 52 to 47 per cent. That the motion failed to pass, as well as leader Andrew Scheer’s pledge not to reopen the debate, clearly indicate how gobsmackingly out of touch the Official Opposition remains three decades after the Supreme Court struck down the country’s abortion law.
We would do well to heed Campaign Life Coalition’s call for a renewed debate on abortion law in this country. The issue is hardly closed. Despite its progressive bona fides, Canada doesn’t have a liberal abortion policy. In fact, it in effect has no policy or law at all — just a 1988 Supreme Court judgment rendering the old law unenforceable. When it comes to one of the most divisive issues of our time, we have lived in a legal vacuum for 30 years. The issue endures as a result.
Of course, in introducing the motion, it seems clear the Campaign Life Coalition seeks only to introduce a draconian law and then whittle away further access to abortion as time progresses. Such a method would be a carbon copy of what anti-abortion groups in the United States have done at the state level since abortion was legalized federally there in 1973.
Regardless of any agenda, though, the Campaign Life Coalition is correct in saying this country needs an abortion law. Without one,
We would do well to heed Campaign Life Coalition’s call for a renewed debate.
the issue remains prone to precisely the kind of politicking and electorally driven manipulation as practised by the pro-life and pro-choice lobbies alike.
Abortion also remains an enduring source of division between resolutely pro-choice Quebec and the rest of the country, where, depending on the province, the practice is often less accepted — or, in the case of Prince Edward Island, not even available until last year. (Tellingly, there are no pro-life Conservative MPs from Quebec, according to the CLC website.)
It is easy and tempting to blame pro-life types for continually inflaming the abortion debate. Yet in never legislating an abortion law in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, and thus allowing the issue to fester, successive federal governments are practically as guilty. The government of Justin Trudeau deserves particular scorn for the way it reopened the debate earlier this year: by asking organizations applying for summer-jobs funding to affirm they upheld abortion rights, in effect discriminating against a handful of mostly church groups deemed “anti-choice.”
Certainly, a law governing abortion in this country would be difficult to legislate, for many reasons, including because it would probably have to accommodate the somewhat contradictory reflections of Justice (and feminist icon) Bertha Wilson, who wrote one of the court’s three concurring decisions in the case. She believed women have sovereignty over their own bodies, but also believed that the state has the right to “prescribe conditions” in the case of late-term abortions, given its “compelling interest in the protection of the fetus.”
That’s an inconvenient truth for the prochoice camp — the current prime minister very much included.
Yet recent precedents involving other once contentious social issues suggests such a law is necessary. Once fraught, the issue of gay marriage is now settled in Canada, thanks to the Civil Marriage Act of 2005. Ditto assisted suicide, itself the subject of a 2016 federal law. Similarly, legislation framing the rights and certain limits on abortion would take the air out of the debate once and for all. The air — and the hyperbole. twitter.com/martinpatriquin