ABORTION AND EUTHANASIA: THE NEW DARK AGE

The "honourable"
John Turner ushered
           Canada's 1969
               abortion law

People often think of Canada's abortion synonymous with the Supreme Court ruling of 1988. But the Supreme Court struck down the Canadian abortion law enacted in 1969. The 1969 Justice Minister was the “Honourable” John Turner. In May of that year he stood in the House of Commons and assured a reluctant Parliament that:

“The bill has rejected the eugenic, sociological or criminal offence reasons. The bill limits the possibility of therapeutic abortion to these circumstances: It is to be performed by a medical practitioner who is supported by a therapeutic abortion committee of medical practitioners in a certified or approved hospital, and the abortion is to be performed only where the health or life of the mother is in danger.”[1]

It was an evil ruse: Once the bill became law it did not limit abortion to certain circumstances, it allowed abortions in any circumstance. There were people who warned this would happen. One written brief submitted to Canada’s Parliament back in 1967 warned that abortion acceptance would make Canada step backward in time:

We would enter a second Dark Age where human life counted for little…When we find ourselves killing off our unwanted babies, why not our old people, our crippled, our blind and our sick? Why not all inmates of prisons and mental institutions? …

All abortion, in fact, is human sacrifice. If not to appease our anger, it is the sacrifice of an innocent life to our own comfort and convenience, our social and economic position or perhaps a woman’s peace of mind or physical well-being… To legalize abortion is to give official sanction to it and therefore encourage it not only in some circumstances, but whenever someone thinks it convenient.[2]

They were decried, their voices shouted down. Abortion advocates discounted them as alarmists and religious kooks, … but the kooks and alarmists were right.  The bill did not limit abortion. It encouraged abortion. It played into the logic of human darkness.

In the year that Canada’s abortion bill passed into law (1969) there were 268 abortions in the entire country. The ink was barely dry on the legislation legalizing abortion and the law was being flouted. Within twelve months, the number of Canadian abortions spiked over 4,000 percent to 11,152! In 1972, the official number of abortions in Canada jumped further to 37,299.[3]  The tight narrow guidelines were rarely if ever met.  The number of abortions in Canada increased dramatically and unrelentingly. (By 1982, things got so bad in Canada that abortions outnumbered live births in Canada’s largest city of Toronto![4])

 I had a discussion with a retired Canadian physician whose medical practice was its peak during the 1960s and1970s. He could not remember any request for abortion ever being refused by a hospital abortion committee. He recalled that in his experience, all requests for abortions were simply rubber-stamped.

No abortion law tolerated

Canadian abortion advocates were not happy with any law or even theoretical restrictions. They wanted no law, no appearance of restrictions to abortion, regardless of how ineffective or phony Canada’s legislation might have been. They wanted abortion on demand! In 1988, the abortion lobby got its wish when Canadian Supreme Court struck down Canada’s abortion law. Abortion advocates literally danced in the streets. (Since then, there has been no law restricting abortion in Canada. It is legal to have an abortion for any reason, or no reason at all, during all nine months of pregnancy.)

America follows suit

          By the time of America’s infamous 1973 Roe verses Wade abortion decision by the United States Supreme Court, Canada had had its abortion legislation for nearly three and a half years. By that time, its rate of abortion increased over 13,000 percent! All America had to do was look north to Canada, with a fraction its population, for an indication of what lay in store for the US.  

But sadly the human carnage that was occurring north of the 49^th parallel was exactly what American “progressive” secularists had been conniving to get for years: unrestricted abortion. They knew that permissiveness toward abortion would result in wild increases in abortion rates, and that's what happened.

           

Former abortionist and abortion rights activist, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, wrote about this in his 1983 book The Abortion Papers: Inside the Abortion Mentality.[5] He wrote that during the 1960s groups like the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) claimed, without documentation, that there were more than a million illegal abortions in America annually. Actual demographic studies on that time showed an average of 98,000 illegal abortions annually between 1940-1967.  By any standard, misstating the number of abortions by 902,000 annually is an exaggeration of monumental proportions!

More than 57 million abortions have occurred in America since Roe v Wade in 1973. 

According to Paul Belien of The Brussels Journal there are 40 million abortions performed in the world each year.[6]  The Canadian kooks who spoke against abortion, forty years ago, were right.

“We would enter a second Dark Age where human life counted for little…When we find ourselves killing off our unwanted babies, why not our old people, our crippled, …”

We have entered that New Dark Age. The next assault on the sanctity of human life they predicted  is about to begin in Canada in 2016. Canada's Supreme Court struck down Canada's assisted suicide law. The religious kooks were right! 

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Notes
[1] Hansard, May 6^th 1969, pp.8397-8.

[2] Taken from, Alponse de Valk, Morality and Law in Canadian Politics: The Abortion Controversy (Montreal. P.Q., Canada: Palm Publishing, 1974), p. 51. Out of print. See House of Commons Committee Proceeding minutes -- Abortion, November 8, 1967, Appendix “F,” pp.168ff..

[3] Government of Canada. Statistics Canada, Therapeutic Abortions, 1981, Minister of Supply and Services 1983, Catalogue 82-211, P.120.

[4]“Abortions outnumber live births in Toronto,” Toronto Globe and Mail, June 17^th, 1983.

[5] In the mid-1979s, Dr. Nathanson renounced his abortion activities and advocacy. He became vehemently opposed to abortion and pro-Life advocate, and later became a Christian.

[6] Paul Belien, “EU to Catholic Doctors: Thou Shalt Abort,” The Brussels Journal, 27 December 2005.