Go to the website of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign and you’ll read a constant refrain from women who regret their abortions: “I wish I had known the truth about abortion.” If that’s so, how could Dawn Fowler, Canadian director of the National Abortion Federation, claim on CBC Radio that abortion clinics ensure that the women going to them for abortions give “informed consent”? It’s simply not true. It’s yet another instance of the falsifications that the pro-abortion community propagates to hoodwink the general public.

On the CBC radio show The Current recently, Anna Maria Tremonti interviewed Dawn Fowler and Rod Bruinooge, the Conservative MP who chairs the multi-party pro-life caucus in Parliament. The subject was Bill C-150, “Roxanne’s Law,” that sought to make it a crime to coerce a woman into an abortion. Mr. Bruinooge had introduced this as a private member’s bill. Shortly after the CBC interview, the Bill came up for Second Reading in the House, and was defeated.

Ms Fowler dismissed the Bill as “a thinly-veiled attempt to regulate abortion. It’s not a bill about protecting women. It’s an anti-choice bill.”

Informed consent on abortion: ”essential”

She said, “I think providers already ensure that women are not coerced into having an abortion. Informed consent is an essential component of reproductive health care. The reproductive health care providers already have numerous measures in place to ensure that women make informed and uncoerced decisions regarding their care.  So legislation like this is being proposed that single out abortion care as a possible setting for coercion doesn’t reflect the realty of the situation. Reproductive health care providers are working to address this important issue.”

She was asked how NAF determines that a woman is having an abortion voluntarily. Her reply: “The counsellors, nurses, physicians are all trained to recognize signs of coercion and violence. The NAF sets the standard for quality care in North America.  One of the standards of care is informed consent and there must be documentation that the patient is uncoerced.”

Unbiased abortion counselling is lacking

Angelina Steenstra (pictured above), who, as  national coordinator for Canada of Silent No More Awareness Campaign, hears many stories of women who regret their abortions, commented to HPL: “there is a great difference between theory and what actually happens.”

She added, “I am not aware of any counselling that takes place at abortion centres. I have not had the experience of knowing anyone who has received real unbiased counselling when going for an abortion.”

Pressure to abort “ferocious”  

How might Dawn Fowler have responded had she heard of the following experience?

“I have been outside abortuaries and seen women literally dragged into the abortuaries on the streets of Toronto, and I’ve talked to many, many women prior to an abortion who feel ferocious pressure from the boyfriend, husband, parents and others — it’s hard to believe the kind of pressure these women are under, and they’re already incredibly vulnerable.”

That’s Father Tom Lynch speaking. He’s the national director of Priests for Life Canada, and he made that statement while interviewing Mr. Bruinooge on Radio Teopoli, a public Catholic radio station (broadcast on AM530 Multicultural Radio).

Fr. Lynch stressed the vulnerability of immigrants and refugees, noting that the Bill is named after a new Canadian (Roxanne was a Filipino woman murdered in Winnipeg by her boyfriend because she wouldn’t abort his child). He has seen, he said, “many illegal refugees — immigrants — who are quite isolated and alone and if the ones closest to them are turning up the pressure even to the point of, for instance, threatening to report them to the authorities to be deported, threatening to kick them out on the streets with no means of support — that kind of pressure can really throw a woman in ways that’s hard even to imagine.”

 Grief and healing after abortion

On the website of Silent No More Awareness Canada, women who have found the courage to acknowledge their abortions have written about their grief and healing. A few brief quotes:

• One woman “afraid to be a mom . . . let her mother talk her into having an abortion.”
• Another, who had had one abortion and was then abandoned by her husband, became pregnant a second time. She booked herself into an abortuary but changed her mind one hour before the appointment. The hospital abortionist tried “shaming and ridiculing” her into re-scheduling.
• A third gave in to pressure from her boyfriend and couldn’t face telling her parents she was pregnant — she “felt trapped.”

Does that sound like ensuring fully-informed consent?

Go to the NAF website. You’ll see abortion defined as a procedure to remove the “products of conception.” (Does a woman conceive a product? She conceives a baby.) It states that some women feel grief, claims that clinics provide post-abortion counselling (where was it for the women of Silent No More Awareness?), but downplays the deep psychological pain of abortion and denies its physical health risks. Does that sound like an organization dedicated to “Informed consent is an essential component of reproductive health care”?

Rod Bruinooge said that even if his bill failed, the discussion would educate the public. It’s unfortunate that the public education was distorted by NAF’s mis-information.

Go to the Silent No More Awareness website for a true education.