VANCOUVER, British Columbia, November 24, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A report calling for increased access to contraception in Canada to reduce the country’s abortion rate has been criticized by Canada’s leading pro-life organization, who says that experience shows that more contraception inevitably leads to more abortion, not less.
“Induced abortion in Canada 1974–2005: trends over the first generation with legal access,” was researched by Wendy V. Norman and published this past August.
In the conclusion of the report, Norman writes: “Trends over three decades indicate consistently that half of all women having abortions are in their twenties. These findings indicate a significant unmet need for effective contraception among Canadian women.”
But Jack Fonseca, a Campaign Life Coalition Project Manager, told LifeSiteNews that if Canada were to heed the report’s recommendation, there would be a “significant rise” in the abortion rate.
Pro-life leaders have argued for years that the widespread use of contraception necessarily leads to a higher demand for abortion. Their arguments have been borne up by research linking increased contraception use to higher abortion rates.
One study, released earlier this year, also in the journal Contraception, conducted surveys of about 2,000 Spanish women aged 15 to 49 every two years from 1997 to 2007. Researchers found that over this period the number of women using contraceptives increased from 49.1% to 79.9%.
Yet they noted that in the same time frame the country’s abortion rate more than doubled from 5.52 per 1,000 women to 11.49.
The researchers, who were pro-contraception, were clearly puzzled by the results. They wrote that the findings were “interesting and paradoxical,” and suggest that the rise in abortion rate may be due to “inadequate or inconsistent use” of contraceptives.
But pro-life leaders say that the link has much more to do with the inherent anti-life mentality and encouragement of promiscuity involved in contraception. While contraception gives people a sense of security to engage in casual sex, when it fails – as it will statistically do some of the time – they will most likely turn to abortion as their backup plan.
In response to the Spanish study, Dr. Brian Clowes, the Director of Research and Training for Human Life International, had argued: “The whole idea is just to get people on contraception so they can sell them abortion.”
“I’ve been all around the world, and the way they start trying to legalize abortion is to legalize contraception first,” said Clowes. “And of course it fails tremendously, and so women start looking for illegal abortions. … Then the same people who are pushing contraception say now we have to legalize abortion. It’s a really neat little system that works every time.”’
Fonseca agrees, arguing that the lucrative business link between contraception and abortion points to the inherent connection between the two.
“There are people making money from this,” he said. “First of all, the abortion industry knows the more they push contraception, the more abortions people are going to have and the more money they will make. So it is in the abortion industry’s best interest to push contraception.”
“Increased contraception would actually cause the women who have had only one abortion to fall into the repeat category, because they will become even more reliant on contraception as some kind of fail-safe method and will engage in more causal sex,” he said.
Fonseca said that CLC’s initiative to end abortion is not by expanding contraceptive services, but by putting a plug into Canadian tax dollars that currently fund abortion. In one province alone – Ontario – abortion costs taxpayers an estimated $30 million per year.
“If we remove the financial incentive for abortion, people will take more personal responsibility and it will reduce the abortion rate,” he said.
A recent poll commissioned by Campaign Life Coalition, LifeSiteNews.com, and The Interim found that the majority of Ontarians actually oppose taxpayer funding of abortion.
The poll revealed that more than six in ten Ontarians oppose the status quo of paying for all abortions in the province while just three in ten support subsidizing the elective procedure.
“The poll supports the common-sense view that taxpayers should not be paying for the lifestyle choices people make” said Alissa Golob, Director of CLC Youth, the group which organized the Defund Abortion Rally at Queen’s Park in October that drew over 2300 supporters.
CLC Youth has been collecting signatures to petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to “cease providing taxpayers’ dollars for the performance of abortions by passing legislation to remove abortion as a service covered by the Ontario Health Insurance Plan”.
Matthew Wojciechowski, a CLC Youth coordinator, told LifeSiteNews today that so far they have collected close to 5000 signatures, one fourth of the 20,000 signatures that they hope to deliver to Ontario MPPs.
“We have had such a great outpouring of support from people from all over the province,” he said, adding that their campaign is “really starting to pick up.”
Join CLC Youth’s Defund Abortion Facebook fan page here.
Download CLC Youth’s blank petition to Defund Abortion here.