OTTAWA, Jan. 31, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Three Canadian Members of Parliament are calling on federal police to launch an investigation after the revelation that, according to Statistics Canada, 491 babies were left to die after they were born alive following a failed abortion between 2000 and 2009.
The case sparked outrage across Canada and beyond, though it was ignored by mainstream media, after the country’s official statistics agency confirmed the data in November.
“These incidents appear to be homicides. Therefore a thorough police investigation is required, and I am formally requesting you to pursue that,” wrote Tory MPs Maurice Vellacott (Saskatoon-Wanuskwein), Leon Benoit (Vegreville-Wainwright), and Wladyslaw Lizon (Mississauga East-Cooksville) in a Jan. 23rd letter to RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson.
The MPs note that Section 223(2) of the Criminal Code recognizes a child’s legal rights “after proceeding fully from the mother’s womb.” So, they say, “there should be 491 homicide investigations or prosecutions in connection with these deaths.”
They say the deaths fall under the RCMP’s jurisdiction because they “took place across Canada” and because the federal police agency is also the provincial police force in many Canadian provinces.
However, a spokesman for the RCMP told LifeSiteNews that the agency will not confirm or deny whether an investigation is or will be underway. “We do not comment or confirm or deny what may or may not be the subject of an investigation,” he said.
The spokesman also said they “cannot confirm” if the results of any investigation would ever be made public, adding that in general after the RCMP conducts an investigation, the results “may be made public.”
Pro-life blogger Patricia Maloney first discovered the data about the abortions, which took place between 2000 and 2009, in the federal agency’s online database in October. The 491 deaths reported to StatsCan are listed in CANSIM table 102-0536, under code P96.4, which is titled “Termination of pregnancy, affecting fetus and newborn.”
In an e-mail to LifeSiteNews in November, StatsCan’s Owen Phillips explained that this code indicates the cause of the born child’s death was an abortion. He said these are not stillbirths, which have a different table.
Pro-life activists have long known that babies are often born alive and then left to die after failed abortions, but did not know how frequently this occurred in Canada.
Jill Stanek, a former nurse in Chicago turned pro-life blogger, has described witnessing babies being born alive after failed abortions, then being brought to a “soiled utility room” and left to die. Her testimony sparked the state’s Born Alive Infant Protection Act.
“My experience was that they [the babies] survive as short as a few minutes, to once, almost as long as an eight hour shift,” she said in 2008.
In one instance, she said she heard that a child was being left, and she “couldn’t bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone.” “And so I cradled and rocked him for the forty-five minutes that he lived.”
In another grisly case, abortionist Kermit Gosnell was arrested in 2011 after allegedly slitting the spinal chords of hundreds of newborn babies who were born alive in the process of an attempted abortion.
In their letter, the MPs quote Section 223(2) of the Criminal Code, which indicates that a person is guilty of homicide “when he causes injury to a child before or during its birth as a result of which the child dies after becoming a human being.”
They say the section means that “anyone who interferes with a pregnancy such that the child dies after it is born alive due to that interference is guilty of homicide.”
LifeSiteNews.com has not heard back from StatsCan after questioning the agency in November about what they did with the data when it was reported and if they had alerted Canada’s Justice Minister.
LifeSiteNews.com also contacted Justice Minister Rob Nicholson in November, and again Jan. 31st, but has not heard back.
Contact Information:
Prime Minister Stephen Harper
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Justice Minister Rob Nicholson
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