VIEWS ON ABORTION COMPLEX, NUANCED
New poll shows broad support for status quo
At 21 weeks a fetus doesn’t have the ability to breathe outside a woman’s body.
The alveoli, the tiny sacs that fill with oxygen, haven’t fully developed, and its premature lungs lack surfactant, the slippery substance that keeps those tiny air sacs from collapsing and sticking together when they deflate.
But imagine if that fetus could be placed inside an artificial womb, a translucent, plastic, fluid-filled vessel that closely mimics the uterine environment, an oxygenator powered only by the fetal heart.
Artificial wombs are already being used to incubate immature baby lambs that are developmentally equivalent to extremely premature human infants.
Some are convinced it may soon become possible to put viable human fetuses — including unwanted ones — inside an “extracorporeal” uterine device where they would grow, bathed in artificial amniotic fluid, until their lungs, brains and other organs matured while technicians watched from the outside, playing soothing sounds of a maternal heartbeat.
It is just one way new technologies are pushing the boundaries of “fetal viability,” challenging our ideas about what constitutes the beginning of life, and confronting us with discomforting questions about abortion.
A vast majority of Canadians believe abortion should be illegal in the third trimester of pregnancy, from 28 weeks onward. But if a fetus could be grown in “biobags,” how might we feel about abortions even in the second, between 14 and 28 weeks?
Debating such questions in Canada is difficult when both sides of the abortion argument are so polarized that those in the middle are effectively silenced.
“There’s a middle group that, if there was anybody interested in organizing them, could probably mediate some of the stuff at the far ends of both spectrums,” says Frances Kissling, president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy in Washington and a pro-choice Catholic who once directed a New York State abortion clinic after abortion was made legal in that state in the 1970s.“it wouldn’t make everybody happy. But nobody is happy now, anyway.”
That middle group is widely represented in our society, with a new extensive national survey finding many Canadians hold more nuanced and conflicting views on abortion than either side would have people believe.
Thirty-two years after the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada’s abortion law, a DART & Maru/blue poll conducted for the National Post finds seven in 10 Canadians consider the current situation on abortion — no legal restrictions on abortion, at any stage of pregnancy — acceptable.
“Outside of a fraction of the country, the abortion issue, on the whole, as a medical transaction, seems done,” says longtime pollster John Wright, a partner with DART.
Wright first surveyed the Canadian populace on abortion in 1989, the year Jean-guy Tremblay obtained a Quebec provincial court injunction preventing his ex-girlfriend, Chantal Daigle, from getting an abortion. Daigle appealed to the Supreme Court, which would set aside the injunction, ruling that the “substantive rights which are alleged to support it — the rights accorded to a fetus or a potential father — do not exist,” further entrenching the Morgentaler ruling.
When the Angus Reid Group (of which Wright was then a senior vice president) polled Canadians, 44 per cent of those surveyed believed abortion should be legal in some circumstances, 32 per cent said when the woman wanted it and 22 per cent said it should be prohibited unless the mother’s life was at risk.
The new DART poll found just one in 10 considers abortion unacceptable. The majority, 71 per cent, said a woman should be able to get an abortion should she decide she wants one, no matter the reason.
However, when he looks at the data, Wright sees a much deeper issue, “a quandary that now puts abortion in the realm of the assisted dying debate.”
“We are past the stage of whether or not we should have the moral, ethical, legal and legislative right” to a doctor-assisted departure from this world, Wright says. “On that issue, we’re now into the weeds of deciding the final what and when. And that’s comparatively where the abortion issue is now,” he says.
Just over 85,000 abortions were performed in hospitals and clinics in Canada in 2018, the Canadian Institute for Health Information reported this week. That’s down from 94,000 in 2017, the year the abortion drug Mifegymiso became available, allowing women to have an abortion in the privacy of their own homes. The pill, which is actually a two-pill regimen, can be prescribed within the first nine weeks of pregnancy. A normal pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks.
The current survey highlights some tough areas of ethical and moral debate.
Although two-thirds (62 per cent) of Canadians, led by Quebec and B.C., identify as primarily pro-choice, and only one in 10 as pro-life (led by Alberta, at 19 per cent), one quarter of Canadians said they don’t fit neatly into either category.
Three-quarters believe an abortion should be legal when there’s evidence the fetus may be mentally or physically impaired. Six in 10 believe abortion should be legal if the woman or family can’t afford to raise the child.
Almost unanimously (93 per cent) Canadians believe doctors should be required by law to inform women about potential risks of surgical abortion before performing the procedure. More than three-quarters favour a law requiring doctors to inform women about alternatives to abortion, such as adoption. Two-thirds would back a law requiring women seeking abortion to wait 24 hours between counselling and having the procedure done. Half believe there should be a law requiring women under 18 to get parental consent for an abortion. Seven in 10 say abortion should be generally illegal in the last three months of pregnancy. Only 57 per cent believe abortion should be generally legal in the second trimester.
A dominant majority reject outright abortions for sex (usually male) selection.
Canadians may be broadly fine with abortion — when asked whether the government should reopen the issue of abortion, three-quarters believe things should be left as they are. But even then we seem conflicted. When told Canada is unique in the world in that it has zero legal boundaries on abortion, half of Canadians think politicians should at least be willing to talk about providing some regulatory framework. In Quebec, where 73 per cent described themselves as primarily prochoice, people are more likely than the Canadian average (52 per cent vs. 49 per cent) to support some kind of national dialogue on abortion.
There is a deep current of public sentiment beneath the surface that isn’t yet resolved, Wright says. “That’s the soft spot of the debate,” he says. “The question is, ‘Who wants to put it on the table?’”
But the rhetoric in the debate is increasing, on both sides.
Kissling says the extremes on both sides control the politics, engaging in the equivalent of entrenched warfare, ignoring the moral complexities and reducing the debate to absolutist positions.
“People on both sides of the issue are nervous about speaking about things that are ethically complex, because how will those things be used by people on the other side,” Kissling says. Give an inch, and you give away the store.
There are prices to be paid for nuance, and so people stick to the simple line, even though there is often remarkable overlap in what people in opposing camps believe.
“Those of us who are prochoice present pro-lifers as adamant — ‘no abortion for any reason, just let the woman die,’” Kissling says. Pro-lifers present pro-choice people as believing abortion on the way to the delivery room is entirely acceptable. “Neither of those things is true,” Kissling says.
Joanna Erdman, associate professor at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University, says there’s a lack of nuance in public debates on abortion “because of the kinds of questions too often asked in public polls on abortion. Questions that aren’t meaningful to the lives of people most directly affected.”
Ask a minor with an unwanted pregnancy and unsupportive parents about parental consent, and “one would likely get a very different answer than from a random poll,” Erdman says.
“A meaningful question about abortion later in pregnancy would ask about the reasons why people seek and need abortion through pregnancy, and about the hardships endured, the resources required and the stigma suffered by many in accessing this care.”
Kissling, dubbed the “philosopher of the pro-choice movement” by Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, agrees that no woman enters into an abortion lightly. “There are reasons women have abortions, and if those reasons didn’t exist, many of them would continue their pregnancies,” she says.
But for many, abortion is a genuinely complex moral issue. The problem is that when we say something is a moral issue, our mind goes immediately to the negative, Kissling says. “Morality is about no. It’s not about yes.”
Yet there is remarkable overlap in what people who identify as pro-life and people who identify as pro-choice believe, she says, and we need to talk about those grey areas. While our leaders prefer to stick to the messaging, their preoccupation is with the packaging, she says, “with the wrapping paper and the ribbon.”
“Looking inside the box is scary.”
The DART & Maru/blue poll was conducted among 1,515 randomly selected Canadian adult members of Maru/blue’s online panel on Dec. 5 to 8 and is considered accurate within plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.
PEOPLE ON BOTH SIDES ... ARE NERVOUS ABOUT SPEAKING ABOUT THINGS THAT ARE ETHICALLY COMPLEX ... HOW WILL THOSE THINGS BE USED BY ... THE OTHER SIDE?