PUBLICATION:
The
New Brunswick Telegraph Journal
DATE:
2003.05.17
SECTION:
Opinion/Editorial
PAGE:
A6
COLUMN: Richard Roik
BYLINE:
RICHARD ROIK Inside Ottawa
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MP
sees abortion as a health issue, not one of morality
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some
15 years after the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the country's abortion
law, the politically charged issue is back before Parliament - with a vengeance.
The timing isn't lost on Canadian Alliance MP Garry Breitkreuz, who called it
"miraculous" that debate on his abortion bill opened this week, just
two days before the sixth annual March for Life on Parliament Hill on Wednesday.
New
Brunswick is lodged in the middle of the morally divisive debate. Critics claim
N.B.'s restrictive abortion policies contravene the Canada Health Act, and the
abortion services it does provide are muddled and misleading. But Saint John MP
Elsie Wayne, who is the Tory co-chair of a non-partisan Parliamentary Pro-Life
Caucus, suggested renegade provinces have nothing to answer for with Ottawa when
there is no evidence that abortion is a medically necessary service that should
be funded by taxpayers.
"It
is time for all of us to speak out," she told almost 1,000 pro-life
marchers on the front lawn of Parliament Hill. "We must not be quiet any
longer."
The
debate will only gather more political punch in the coming months. Mr.
Breitkreuz's motion M-83 - which calls for parliamentary reviews into the health
risks women face undergoing an abortion and whether the procedure should even be
deemed a medically necessary service - is headed for a likely vote in the fall.
"This
is the first vote in 12 years on anything relating to abortion," Mr.
Breitkreuz said.
Mr.
Breitkreuz is also urging Canadians to contact their local MPs this summer to
voice their support for his "reasonable" motion. "This is not a
morality issue, but rather a health issue," he said. In yet another dose of
serendipity, debate on his motion comes at the same time that a controversial
new study has been published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal,
suggesting that women who have abortions have a much higher risk of psychiatric
illness. The researchers found that women who had abortions are 72 per cent more
likely to be hospitalized for psychiatric problems in the first four years after
their pregnancy than women who carried their pregnancies to term.
The
study, however, has already been called into disrepute because the lead authour
is an avowed anti-abortionist. An accompanying commentary in the journal adds
that the study is comparing "apples to oranges," and that the opposite
conclusions may be true: that "psychiatric problems cause women who become
pregnant to feel less capable of raising a child and to terminate their
pregnancy."
Federal
Health Minister Anne McLellan showed little interest this week to discuss the
"post-abortion syndrome" that is the latest twist in the anti-abortion
campaign.
"I'm
not even going to get into that," Ms. McLellan said as she raced from
cabinet to her waiting car on Tuesday. "Obviously, the decisions around
whether an abortion is done or not in this country are medical decisions made
between women and their doctors, and any follow-up treatment is also an issue of
treatment between a doctor and the patient."
Pro-life
politicians insist, however, that more research is required. They even produced
two Ontario women this week to recall the trauma they endured after undergoing
abortions.
Angelina
Steenstra, who now offers post-abortion counselling in Toronto, told reporters
she spent six years in denial after she had an abortion when she was 15. She
said she also became promiscuous to counter her self-loathing, and used drugs
and alcohol to numb the pain of having participated in the "death
experience" of her first child.
A
registered nurse from Ottawa shared similar details about her own "supressed"
emotions, but equally important, she said, is that health-care professionals
need to be better informed about what goes on during an abortion.
"Unfortunately
these are not isolated incidents," Mr. Breitkreuz said.
Pro-life
politicians will not find a soft opposition, however. Only last month, abortion
activists were on the Hill arguing that Ottawa isn't doing enough to enforce
access to abortions. The Canadian Abortion Rights Action League (CARAL) found in
a recent comprehensive survey, for example, that women in New Brunswick are as
likely to be directed to a pro-life organization as they were to the Morgentaler
clinic in Frederiction. In one almost criminal case, a New Brunswick physician
allegedly threatened to drop a woman and her family as his patients if she went
around him to get an abortion.
The
crossfire is backing Ottawa into an increasingly cramped corner. In an interview
with the Telegraph-Journal last fall, Ms. McLellan insisted Ottawa was again
ready to crack down on New Brunswick's 16-year-old policy of requiring two
doctors to approve any abortion, which must also be performed in a public
hospital and before the 12th week of pregnancy.
"Our
view is that obviously abortion is a medically necessary service and therefore
has to be insured, whether it is performed in a hospital or a private
clinic," Ms. McLellan said at the time.
But
as Mr. Brietkreuz questioned those comments as an opening salvo in the debate on
his motion this week, Ms. McLellan displayed little enthusiasm for revisiting
the matter.
"I
hope no one is suggesting that phsyicaisns in this country are making decisions
that are anything other than within the normal decision-making processes for
medical professionals," she said. "And if that is what they are
suggesting, I suggest they take that up with the CMA (Canadian Medical
Association.)"
For all its efforts to keep abortion flying under the national radar, however, Ottawa will soon have no choice but to take a stand.