(LifeSiteNews) –– A pioneering Canadian pro-life child and family psychiatrist has died.
Dr. Philip G. Ney, 89, died at home in Victoria, British Columbia on January 27, 2025, of pneumonia.
Ney, the father of 5 children and 10 grandchildren and the husband of his collaborator Dr. Marie Peeters-Ney, was a Christian who served humanity in a several roles: as the founder of adventure programs for young people, West Trek and SALTS; as a doctor and psychiatrist; a university professor; a school board trustee; a political candidate; and the creator of the Hope Alive healing program, for which he trained counselors at his Mount Joy College in Sooke, British Columbia.
Ney was also the author of the pro-life classic Deeply Damaged (1997), a work in which he presents his groundbreaking research into the relationship between child abuse and abortion. The psychiatrist discovered that women abused as children are more likely to abort their unborn children and that women who abort a child are more likely to abuse their other children, a phenomenon Ney called a “cyclic connection.” He also learned that a mother’s abortion can lead to post-abortion survivor syndrome in her other children.
“There is nothing more damaging to a family than the abortion of one of the children,” Dr. Ney said in an interview with “Silent No More.”
Ney’s other works include Hope Alive: Post Abortion and Abuse Treatment, a Guide for Group Counselling (1998); Ending the Cycle of Abuse: The Stories of Women Abused as Children and the Group Therapy Techniques That Helped Them Heal (1994); and Abortion Survivors (1998).
The methods of Ney’s Hope Alive program, used to heal survivors of many different kinds of trauma, have been used in 27 countries, and he set up the IIPLCARR (International Institute of Pregnancy Loss and Child Abuse Research and Recovery) in the 1990s.
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Ney was born in 1935 and raised on a farm north of Nanaimo, B.C. He was related through his mother to a leading Canadian political family, the Aikens; his great-grandfather James Cox Aikens served as secretary of state to Sir John A. MacDonald. Ney’s great-uncle William Aikens, also a physician, pioneered radiotherapy in Canada.
Ney himself studied at the University of Victoria, in Victoria, B.C., before his medical studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC), from which he graduated in 1960. He trained as a Child and Family Psychiatrist at both McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and at the University of London in London, England. Subsequently he studied Developmental Psychology at the University of Illinois.
Ney taught at UBC for 22 years as well as at the University of Hong Kong, the University of Otago (New Zealand), the University of Montreal, and the University of Calgary.
He published his first paper on the “cyclic connection” between child abuse and abortion in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry in 1979.