QUEBEC CITY, March 31, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) — If Quebec’s socialist-feminist-left is to be believed, the province’s Liberal government has unforgivably endangered the sanctity of abortion “rights” with its new health bill.
In what jaded political watchers regard as a ritualized response to the election of any non-separatist regime, Premier Phillippe Couillard’s Bill 20 is being condemned because it requires more work from its general practitioners, possibly delaying the virtually instantaneous provision of abortions now available.
So warned an op-ed piece in the pro-abortion Montreal Gazette by Sandeep Prasad of Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights. “Seemingly,” writes Prasad, “the due diligence requirement Bill 20 proposes could bottleneck access to services by penalizing family physicians whose patients opt to seek abortion care directly without seeking a referral through their practice. This could effectively add weeks of wait time for a procedure that is already time-sensitive.”
Speaking for a coalition of pro-abortion groups, Anne-Marie Messier, the director of the Centre de santé des femmes, told the same paper, “What we’re saying is family planning and access to abortions are fundamental—the No.1 priority when it comes to equality between men and women.”
Bill 20, the Gazette reported, would apparently limit the number of abortions each doctor can do to 504, while forcing many underperforming (in the government’s eyes) physicians to take on more patients, which they could do by simply doing abortions. But Messier likes the current system that sees a handful of skilled abortionists doing “upward of 80%” of abortions.
The new system could force GPs to pad their quota by examining patients first before referring them for abortion, which, Messier fears, “could cut access to specialized family planning clinics, privatize essential health services… and potentially expose people to anti-choice or unsympathetic practitioners acting as so-called ‘gatekeepers’” who “delay access to abortion services rather than facilitate access to care.”
But Georges Buscemi of Campagne Quebec-Vie sees the attacks on the Couillard government as a seasonal political ritual. “It is spring in Quebec and we have a Liberal government,” says the pro-life veteran. “In Quebec we are given to protests by unionists, students and the Parti Quebecois whenever the Liberals are elected.”
As Buscemi sees it, the ritual is played out by seizing on the slightest pretext to prove that the “right-wing” Liberals are assaulting something sacred to separatists or leftists in the name of austerity.
“Here like in Latin America, Spain and Greece, the Socialist International is protesting. Here in Quebec they call them ‘Couillard’s austerity measures,’ but they are hardly austerity, just a determination to spend money more slowly and responsibly,” said Buscemi.
For the last Liberal government, the issue was university tuition hikes. This time, says Buscemi, “it is claiming that the Liberals have a hidden agenda to do away with abortion rights.” But this is not going to happen, said Buscemi.
Indeed Health Minister Gaetan Barrette wasted no time in making ritual abasement before what Buscemi described as the “sacrament” of abortion. “There won’t be a limitation in Quebec to abortion access,” Barrette told reporters. “It’s not our intention, and Bill 20 doesn’t do that.”
Barrette, a medical doctor himself, then engaged in some myth-building, harkening back to his days in medical school, when abortion, though perfectly legal, was still discreditable enough to lead some women to check into hospital at night. But those days are gone and “that’s the way it should be,” he declared. “That’s the way it is in Quebec and that’s the way it has to remain.”
Confounding those who had read the legislation, Barrette then said Bill 20 would allow doctors to do more than 1,000 abortions each. (Quebec doctors do about 25,000 abortions a year in total.)
Couillard echoed his minister, declaring, “It is out of the question to go back on this very large Quebecois consensus that aims to give women access to abortion that is not only free but as accessible as possible.”
Indeed, as Prasad boasted, Quebec has half of Canada’s freestanding abortion clinics, which operate so efficiently, added Buscemi, they do the operation on the same day as the first visit.
But Buscemi argued that Quebec should stop funding virtually all abortions in an op-ed piece he submitted Monday to the Montreal Gazette. “In almost all abortion cases, the life of the mother is not in danger. The simple truth is that more than 96% of the time, abortions today are performed for convenience, as a back-up birth control method. That’s clearly not a medical necessity and should not be funded as such.”
This would save $26-30 million per year, he estimated, “enough to hire over 138 family doctors, or 360 nurses, or purchase 17 MRI machines or provide therapy to 328 additional autistic kids each year. All these uses of taxpayer dollars would represent genuine health care… rather than ending a developing human life.”