OTTAWA, Feb 15 (LifeSiteNews) – Canada’s newly appointed Supreme Court of Justice Louis LeBel gave an interview to CPAC last Friday during which he mimicked US presidential hopeful Al Gore in repudiating his former pro-life stance. In the interview, which is to air at 9pm tonight on the Canadian Public Affairs Channel (CPAC), Lebel said, “Abortion is a very complex issue, and I have grown to doubt very much the ability of the law to govern such a question.”
LifeSite reported in December that Lebel, was painted as a “practicing Roman Catholic” and an “abortion foe” by the secular media. The Toronto Star quoted Henri Grondin, LeBel’s former law partner of 20 years as saying of LeBel, “He was against the abortion because, he told me, ‘I cannot, as a Christian, support that. It is against my conscience.’”
Speaking on pro-life legislation, Lebel suggested it was inevitable and unworkable. He said, “How can you really apply such a law? There have been experiences in other countries that have tried to apply strict abortion laws and what has been the result? Disaster. Abortions in unsanitary conditions and so on and so on, but abortions anyway.” Asked what he would do if Parliament, or the provinces, were to pass new laws restricting abortion, whose constitutionality was challenged in court, LeBel said he would “try to keep an open mind.”
Interestingly, comments made yesterday by Pope John Paul II directly counter Lebel’s suggestion that laws against abortion are not feasible. Of anti-life legislation and its supposed inevitability he said, “Civil and moral conscience cannot accept this false inevitability, just as it cannot accept the idea of the inevitable nature of war or inter-ethnic slaughter.”
For more from LifeSite on Lebel click here.
See National Post coverage of the interview.