How many abortions committed in Canada? We usually use the figure of 100,000, but the truth is that the organizations entrusted with collecting and disseminating this information don’t know, or, if they do, they’re not telling us.

This raises at least two critical questions:

• Why are tax-payers not informed of this procedure for which they pay by public funding?
• Why is an important statistic of hospital and clinic abortions now concealed, even though it was published before?

 Statistics Canada used to publish the data but this task has been passed to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI). However, clinics are not required to provide information; they are only invited to do so. Clinics in six provinces and territories did not report and there is no guarantee that all clinics in Ontario reported full figures.

 So the result is that there is no accurate figure for the number of abortions done in Canada or Ontario in 2008, no reliable indication of whether the number is going up or down.

 Clinic abortions are up

The published figures for Ontario show that:

• Hospital abortions (hospitals are required by law to report) declined slightly by 711 from 15,213 in 2007 to 14,502 in 2008;
• Clinic abortions rose by 526 from 17,138 to 17,664;
• Total abortions fell by 185 from 32,351 to 32,166.

It is estimated that each hospital abortion costs $1000 and each clinic abortion costs $500. That means that in Ontario, clinic abortions cost nearly $9 million, yet there is no requirement in law for clinics to report how they are spending public money. (See also http://www.haltonprolife.com/public-funding-of-abortions-no-in-developing-world-yes-in-canada  )

Teenage abortions are down?

Teenage abortions in Ontario were also reported as falling slightly:

• Hospital abortions on teens fell by 17 from 2,328 to 2,311;
• Reported clinic abortions on teens fell by 32 from 2,816 to 2,744;
• Total teen abortions fell by 89 from 5,144 to 5,055.

 However, since clinics are not required to report, there’s no guarantee that teen abortions did in fact fall.

Abortions by age of child in womb — facts withheld

No longer reported are figures on abortions by gestational age, which Statistics Canada used to publish.

• More than half the people in Canada (55 per cent according to an Environics Poll in 2009) want legal protection for children in the womb beyond six months gestation.
• Nearly half (47 per cent) want protection from three months on.
• Many believe, wrongly, that there is protection beyond three months.

How many abortions are done beyond the gestational age at which most Canadians want them to be restricted by law? We don’t know, because StatsCan won’t tell us.

 Abortions in Canada: “unknown”

For Canada as a whole, the number of abortions performed in hospitals was 44,416 in 2008, but the number for clinic abortions is listed as “unknown.”

However, if the figures for the numbers of clinic abortions for the provinces that do report are compared to the numbers of hospital abortions for the same provinces, on average clinics perform 13 abortions for every 10 in hospitals, which would bring the total in Canada of hospital and clinic abortions to 103,500. There is no way of knowing the true figure, of course, because of the under-reporting. But we can reasonably assume that the 100,000 per year figure is still a reliable estimate.

For more statistics, refer to Alliance for Life Ontario at http://www.allianceforlife.org/stats.html and for the Environics research: http://www.lifecanada.org/html/resources/polling/2009_Environics_Poll_on_Abortion.pdf