OTTAWA, Sept. 25, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Catholic Women’s League (CWL) of Canada is urging Prime Minister Stephen Harper to champion a bill that would end the “heinous” practice of sex-selective abortion.
In a Sept. 17th letter to the Prime Minister, Betty Anne Brown Davidson, the CWL’s national president, says her organization’s members are “deeply concerned” that an unborn girl “could be aborted just because she is, in fact, female.”
She says the CWL discussed the issue at their annual national convention in August, and was writing the Prime Minister on behalf of the League’s 91,000 members.
“The abortion of any fetus is the taking of an innocent life and is an attack on the dignity of all human life,” she wrote. “Sex selective abortion as a result of prenatal testing is a heinous form of discrimination against unborn women and the mothers who conceive them.”
“I respectfully request the federal government investigate the pervasiveness of this discriminatory practice and enact legislation to prevent this practice which does not protect women or the dignity of human beings from conception to natural death,” she added.
The issue of sex selective abortion was in the fore this year after Conservative MP Mark Warawa tabled a motion that would have seen Parliament condemn the practice.
Though all of the parties in Parliament have condemned sex-selective abortion in the past, and the motion would have been non-binding, both the Opposition and the government opposed Warawa’s motion on the claim that it was a backdoor attempt to advance debate on the legality of abortion.
The motion provoked something of a democratic crisis in March when the Conservatives, New Democrats, and Liberals united at committee to quash the motion by declaring it non-votable.
In her letter, Davidson said children in the womb should be protected just like children created through in vitro fertilization, noting that Canada’s Assisted Human Reproduction Act, passed in 2004, prohibits the use of technology to predetermine a child’s sex.
”As in vitro embryos are protected from non-medically necessary sex selection under federal legislation, fetuses should be afforded similar protection,” she wrote.
Read the CWL's full letter here.
Contact:
Prime Minister Stephen Harper
[email protected]