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August 5, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — The number of abortions on Prince Edward Island has doubled in the two years since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal government pressured the province to allow the killing of unborn children on the island.

PEI ministry of health data obtained by pro-life blogger Patricia Maloney show that there were 67 abortions on the Island in 2017, 86 in 2018, and 143 in 2019.

And according to data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), 147 unborn children were killed in PEI in 2017 and 205 in 2018, Maloney reported on Run With Life.

CIHI has not released figures for 2019, but the discrepancy between its figures and Health Canada’s is marked. LifeSiteNews contacted both the Health PEI and CIHI for an explanation of the difference in numbers but did not hear back by deadline.

Health PEI also recorded four abortions taking place in 2015 and six in 2016, Maloney discovered.

“It’s tragic to learn the human cost of the former PEI Liberal government’s decision to fund and set up access to abortion starting in 2017,” said Jack Fonseca, director of operations for  Campaign Life Coalition, the political arm of Canada’s pro-life movement. 

It’s generally reported that until January 31, 2017, PEI had been abortion-free for 35 years — the result of tireless efforts by the Island’s pro-life movement, as well as the Catholic Church making it a condition of the 1982 merger of Charlottetown’s Catholic and Protestant hospitals that the new hospital would not commit abortions.  

However, in the run-up to Trudeau’s victory in October 2015, he hinted that as prime minister he would force PEI to provide abortions, and in March 2016, health minister Jane Philpott suggested she would consider withholding health transfer payments to the province if it did not fall into line.

Meanwhile, Abortion Access Now PEI sued the Liberal government of then-Premier Wade MacLauchlan in January 2016 in a court action supported by the Legal and Education Action Fund (LEAF) to allow abortion on the Island.

MacLauchlan announced in September that his government was developing a women’s “wellness” centre that would provide what the government called “pregnancy termination.”

The Women’s Wellness Program & Sexual Health Services is based at Prince County Hospital in Summerside. Abortions are done in the hospital. It is not clear from the government website if they are committed in other hospitals. 

Fonseca puts the blame “squarely” on Canada’s prime minister for PEI’s “deeper plunge into the culture of death.” 

It was because of the pressure Trudeau put on the province to increase abortion access while campaigning there in 2016 that MacLauchlan “caved and promised to ‘remove barriers’ to abortion access,” Fonseca told LifeSiteNews in an email.

“Once recognized as Canada's safe haven for babies in the womb, PEI has now doubled its rate of preborn child murder since this form of homicide was first permitted just two years ago,” Fonseca said. 

“We don’t know for sure whether these killings would have occurred in a different province if PEI had never agreed to provide access, but the doubling effect in just two years, along with rapid, year-over-year increases, suggests to me that the change in government policy has desensitized a lot of Islanders to the horror of abortion, and created a net gain in the number of women choosing it, or otherwise being coerced into taking the lives of their offspring,” he added.  

“Each of the lives should steel the resolve of pro-life Islanders to do the work on the ground to reverse this nightmare over the coming years. It will require much prayer, fasting and political engagement too.”