Popular journalist criticized Canada's lawless abortion situation

Andrew Coyne says it's time to talk about abortion

Andrew Coyne

In 2008 Andrew Coyne, National Post writer and CBC contributor, wrote a detailed article criticizing Canada's inaction on regulating abortion. The article, which printed in Maclean's Magazine, was a response to Henry Morgentaler's appointment to the Order of Canada.

Morgentaler was the famous abortionist who's appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada led to the country being without an abortion law. Coyne said the Morgentaler decision has not brought a Canadian consensus to the abortion issue:

The extraordinary fact that, 20 years after the Supreme Court ruling that bears his (Morgentaler's) name, this country still has no abortion law of any kind. It isn't that abortion — at any stage of a pregnancy, for any reason, and at public expense — is lawful in Canada. It is merely not unlawful. When it comes to abortion, we are literally a lawless society: the only country in the developed world that does not regulate the practice in any way.

Coyne continued slamming the undemocratic process in which the country has failed to allow the abortion issue to be debated. He said the rhetoric politicians give about abortion being a "settled issue" is undemocratic and should be opposed no matter what side of the abortion debate a person stands on:

Over the years, we have all learned to tiptoe around the issue, to refer to it by elaborate euphemisms — "a-woman's-right-to-choose," in the politicians' dutiful catechism. It isn't that abortion has been accepted, in the way that abortion rights advocates would wish, as just another medical procedure. It simply isn't spoken of. Even the citation on Morgentaler's Order of Canada talks, not of his long and prolific career as an abortionist, or even of his part in the removal of the last legal restrictions on the practice, but merely of his commitment to "increased health care options for women."

Coyne went on explaining the history of abortion since the Morgentaler ruling. He noted that the Supreme Court Justices who ruled in Morgentaler's favour had no intention of being the last voice on Canada's abortion law.

After explaining the Brian Mulroney government's failure to enact a proper abortion law, Coyne focused on Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

By the (Conservative) party's founding convention in 2005, what had previously been the lack of a Conservative abortion policy itself became party policy — their policy was to have no policy. Even that was not enough. In 2006, leader Stephen Harper was promising, not merely that his government would not introduce any law on abortion, but that he would "use whatever influence I have" to prevent his MPs from sponsoring bills of their own. And indeed, no bill on abortion has been forthcoming from any government Member.

Coyne also brought up how campus pro-life groups were censored for protesting for the unborn:

What is taboo in federal politics is the subject of something of an Inquisition elsewhere. Pro-life student groups have been banned on a number of campuses across Canada, including York, Carleton, and University of British Columbia-Okanagan. At Lakehead University, the student union voted to withhold "any and all funds, space, resources and services within its control from any group [that] holds any aim, principle, belief goal etc. that is anti-choice in nature, explicit or implicit."

He concluded his article by asking if an abortion debate would be all that scary. Coyne said that the debate would be filled with lots of a emotions and oversimplifications but:

That's true of most democratic debates.... (and) maybe, just maybe, if we start talking about (abortion) again, we might also start listening to each other. Anything's better than the head-shaking, fingers-in-the-ears, nana-nana barracking that goes on now.

Unfortunately the country's blind eye to abortion continues and since Coyne's article approximately 400,000 babies have been terminated.