Abortion is a hot topic this year in Ottawa as several Halton Pro-Life members making the trip to Ottawa for the March for Life on May 15. Two issues are in the spotlight on Parliament Hill and the media:

•  Protection of women against being coerced into abortion
• Public funding of abortions (see separate report).

Coerced abortions

On the issue of coerced abortions, Rod Bruinooge, MP for Winnipeg South and chair of the multi-party Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus, has introduced a Private Member’s Bill, C-510, “An Act to Prevent Coercion of Pregnant Women to Abort (Roxanne’s Law).”

 The Private Members Bill would make it a criminal offence to coerce a woman into having an abortion.

“There are many stories of women being threatened and coerced into having abortions against their will,” Mr. Bruinooge said in submitting the Bill on April 15 this year. “If a woman resists, such coercion may escalate into violence, and even murder. That’s what happened to Roxanne Fernando, in whose memory I have named this bill.”

Women pressured into abortion

There is no need to seek for such extreme cases to discover that coerced abortions are common. A study published in 2004 in the Medical Science Monitor (an International Medical Journal for Experimental and Clinical Research), showed that:

• 64 per cent of American women felt pressured by others to choose abortion.

HPL has no figures for Canadian women but the U.S. figure gives some indication of the number of women being pressured by others, such as boyfriends or parents, into abortions.

The book Women’s Health after Abortion (published by the deVeber Institute) quotes research showing that:

• “23 per cent of women having an abortion in North America are pressured into it by their partners”, and the book’s authors warn that “these estimates may be too low” based on evidence from a survey of men.

Alan Guttmacher Institute admits coercion happens

In 2003, David C. Reardon of the Elliott Institute, which researches and publishes information on the after effects of abortion and post-abortion healing, wrote in The Elliot Institute News:

“In my experience, once this issue is raised, everyone - even pro- abortionists - admit that coercion is occurring. It is common knowledge that abortion often suits lovers and parents more than it suits the pregnant women themselves. It takes no leap of imagination to understand how these persons often pressure, badger, and blackmail a woman into accepting an unwanted ‘safe and legal’ abortion because it will be ‘best for everyone.’

“Even the prominent abortion defender Daniel Callahan writes, ‘That men have long coerced women into unwanted abortion when it suits their purposes is well-known but rarely mentioned. Data reported by the Alan Guttmacher Institute indicate that some 30 per cent of women have an abortion because someone else, not the woman, wants it.’

“This is a powerful political issue. No one can rationally deny that coerced abortions occur, and no politician would dare to defend this practice.”

Roxanne Fernando

Roxanne Fernando was a young woman from Winnipeg who was murdered by Nathanael Plourde (the father of her unborn child) after he failed to convince her to end her pregnancy. In February 2007, Plourde and two friends beat Roxanne brutally and dumped her in a snow bank to die.

“This bill would help protect a pregnant woman who does not want to terminate her pregnancy,” Mr. Bruinooge said. “No woman should ever feel intimidated to have an unwanted abortion. Anyone who attempts to force a woman to abort her wanted fetus should face consequences.”

Contact

Contact information for Mr. Bruinooge: