"The first casualty when war comes is truth," quoth U.S. Senator Hiram Warren Johnson in 1918. And the abortion debate is nothing if not a war. Thus, as the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Canada's abortion law approached, the newspapers were understandably full of passionate arguments for and against the status quo. In several cases, those passionate arguments were deeply flawed.

Among the first off the mark was André Picard in The Globe and Mail, who argued that while the anniversary was certainly a cause for celebration, the issues it solved were ones of access, not morality. Women who have had abortions "have, almost universally, exercised their freedom of choice judiciously, law or no law," he wrote.

As evidence, he suggested that "the number of abortions has not increased. In fact, the number of abortions has held steady over all, and the teen abortion rate has actually fallen. Each year in Canada, there are about 330,000 lives (sic) births and 110,000 abortions. Despite what you see in Hollywood movies, the vast majority of those having abortions are not teens, but women in their 20s and 30s."

Other than the number of live births and abortions, just about all of that is either dead wrong or highly misleading. Abortion rates soared in the wake of the Morgentaler decision, peaking in 1996 at 14.2 per 1,000 Canadian females—40 per cent higher than in 1988. They have since levelled off into a gradual downward trend. The latest year for which data is available from Statistics Canada, 2004, saw the lowest rate of abortion for Canadian women since 1988, but it was still nearly 20 per cent higher. The same trend holds true from the fetus's perspective, as well. In 1988, Canadians in utero had a 15.2 per cent chance of being aborted; in 2004, the number was 22.4.

The vast majority of abortions are indeed administered to women in their 20s and 30s. That's laregly because 90 per cent of pregnant women are in their 20s and 30s. The rate of abortion in that age group is indeed considerably higher than among teenagers, but that's a quite recent phenomenon—the teen rate was higher until 1997. Still, to say the teen abortion rate has fallen since 1988—as Picard implies—is correct only if you ignore every intervening year. It had soared 35 per cent by 1996, and only dropped below the 1988 level in 2004.

Barbara Kay wasn't buying the recent drop in her contribution to the National Post's series on R. vs. Morgentaler. "Young women today are more careless about becoming pregnant, indicating an increasing psychological desensitization to the creation of new life," she wrote. As evidence, she cited the fact that "in 1988, 16% of pregnancies in Quebec, Canada's most abortion-friendly province, resulted in abortion. Today, 30% do."

Those figures are roughly correct. But if young women were "more careless" than in years past when it comes to pregnancy, one would expect to see a greater number of them getting pregnant. One would be disappointed. After peaking in the mid-1990s, teen pregnancy rates have been on the decline nationwide and in every province except Saskatchewan. (That's obviously a main reason behind the drop in the teen abortion rate.)

It's true that in Quebec, the teen pregnancy rate is still marginally higher than it was before the Morgentaler decision. But the correlation between liberal abortion policies and blasé attitudes towards pregnancy—never mind the causation—doesn't play out elsewhere in Canada. Alberta has roughly the same rate of teen pregnancies as Quebec, but only a 43 per cent termination rate. Quebec's rate is 69 per cent. Manitoba has the country's highest teen pregnancy rate, but its termination rate is just 33 per cent. Clearly the legality of abortion is not the main determining factor in who obtains them.

Still in the Post, and further into anti-abortion terrain, Michael Coren was correct—inflammatory terminology notwithstanding—when he wrote that since the Morgentaler decision, "almost two million babies have been killed in what is supposed to be humanity's safest place, the womb." If anything, based on Statistics Canada's figures, he might be lowballing it. But he's on shakier ground when he repeats one of the right-wing blogosphere's most prized zingers: "More abortion doctors have been killed on episodes of Law & Order than have ever been killed in real life!"

Print Article    Send to a Friend    Write a letter to the editor

Digg this Stumble It!   Post to del.icio.us Seed Newsvine   Share on Facebook Technorati links