Many Catholics, Evangelicals, and members of other traditions in Canada are united in their resolve to protect all human life from conception to natural death. And not just as a personal ethic, but as a political stand.
But though Canadian pro-lifers agree that abortion must be stopped, they are deeply divided on how. One side will accept nothing less than a total ban, even to the point of lobbying against Parliament’s last serious attempt at an abortion law – to replace the defective one the Supreme Court had struck down on procedural grounds in R. v. Morgentaler – because it didn’t go far enough.
It was 1991, and when Bill C-43 was defeated, those elated pro-lifers thought a better one would soon come along. For decade after decade since, however, abortion has been legal in Canada up to the moment of birth, for any reason or none at all: not because there’s any positive right to the practice (R. v. Morgentaler never established one), but because Parliament has chosen not to act and pro-lifers have not presented a united front.
Similarly, Campaign Life Coalition, one of Canada’s largest and oldest pro-life lobbying groups, recently declined to endorse a policy proposal within the Conservative Party of Canada to regulate late-term abortion because, again, that would have represented a compromise that would not have protected all unborn children, although, curiously, Campaign Life and its supporters never did submit their own alternative when they had the chance.
The proposal never did reach the party’s virtual national convention in March.
In contrast, a coalition of other Canadian pro-life organizations, led by relative newcomer Right Now, maintains that a partial law that would actually pass (polls show most Canadians oppose late-term abortion, for instance, such as following a gender-determining ultrasound) would be better than no law at all: at least some lives would be saved, and a flag planted and a beachhead established that could lead to later gains or at least arrest our national culture’s dangerous drift toward accepting death as the answer to a problem.
Indeed, against Campaign Life claims that compromise must lead to stagnation on the ideological battlefront, Right Now and partners point to contemporary counterexamples like Poland, which keeps getting more pro-life, one step at a time.
At the 2021 Conservative National Convention itself, many of the delegates were pro-life but were confused by conflicting advice from the different organizations.
Campaign Life presented two 100-riding petitions that were rejected for not being submitted earlier. The coalition also told delegates to vote against the “climate change is real” policy proposal, on which Right Now stayed neutral, and whose close defeat became the top news story at the convention, allowing the popular press to paint “social conservatives” as a laughingstock. (Many aren’t against addressing climate change as much as they are the bad solutions some propose for it, voting down the policy for other reasons, such as leaving out good solutions like phased implementation of Best Technological Practices that would conserve resources, protect health and wildlife without higher taxes or cost of living, as well as satisfy long-term concerns).
Had Campaign Life allowed itself to be advised by others, all groups could have better pooled their knowledge and resources and more could have been accomplished then, as more can yet be.
On Wednesday, April 14, Conservative MP Cathay Wagantall presents her Private Member’s Bill C-233 against sex-selective abortion. May all pro-life organizations and faiths (for example, Sikhism has long formally prohibited daughter-killing) as well as all pro-life Canadians, unite to tell our MPs what they need to do.
Dr. Graham Darling, a consulting research chemist and author, is a parishioner at Holy Cross in Burnaby and chair of its Civic Affairs Committee. He is also chair of the Burnaby North—Seymour Conservative EDA Constitution & Policy Committee and was an elected delegate at the 2021 Conservative Party National Convention. The opinions expressed here are his own.
