News

OTTAWA, Ontario, Sept. 27, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – After British Columbia Tory MP Mark Warawa filed a motion Wednesday calling on Parliament to condemn sex-selective abortions, Canada’s largest pro-life group has launched a petition urging political party leaders and Members of Parliament to get behind it.

Sex-selective abortion is “a reprehensible practice that targets baby girls for female gendercide and represents discrimination against women in its most extreme form,” the petition by Campaign Life Coalition reads.

Image

“Congratulations to Mark Warawa for bringing forward another pro-life motion,” said Jim Hughes, National President of Campaign Life Coalition. “It’s a common sense motion and I hope pro-life people across the country call on their MPs to support it.”

Motion 408, filed by Langley’s Mark Warawa, comes in the wake of a January report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal calling for measures to combat the deadly practice of sex selection in Canada’s Asian immigrant population.

Warawa says he was prompted to take on the issue after reactions over a CBC sting in June that found commercial ultrasound agreeing to scan solely for gender for the purposes of sex selection. The news service found three quarters of the twenty-two facilities they visited in different Canadian cities were willing to do the scans.

In a press release Thursday, the MP noted that all political parties and the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada have condemned sex selection abortion.

Campaign Life’s petition notes that sex selection in countries like India and China have “caused such a critical gender imbalance in some regions that sex slavery and even ‘wife sharing’ have become grave problems.”

Image

It also notes the finding of a 2011 Environics poll, commissioned by LifeCanada, indicating that 92% of Canadians wanted sex-selective abortions banned.

The new initiative is sure to build on the momentum created in recent months in the lead-up to Wednesday’s vote on Woodworth’s M-312. Warawa filed the motion on the very day that Parliament voted 91-203 to defeat M-312, which sought to re-examine the Criminal Code’s definition of human life.

M-408 reads: “That the House condemn discrimination against females occuring through sex-selective pregnancy termination.”

Find more information and copies of the petition.