The Newfoundland health minister is willing to bend over backwards to provide abortion to women in the province’s outlying regions. The CBC is willing to offer one-sided coverage of the crying need of these women and did so this week with two stories.
The only problem is: where are the women?
The CBC highlighted the crying need for a quotable victim with a story posted on its webpage under the headline “Abortion: Steve Kent says he would consider expanded access,” Kent being the province’s minister of health.
Unnamed abortion advocates were cited complaining that the low number of women seeking abortion in the remoter regions of the province “may” point to the lack of abortion services. Rather than make the car trip into St. John’s, in other words, women facing unwanted pregnancy were having their babies.
But Kent said he would consider offering abortion services in the province’s other cities if any women, or doctors had ever asked for it. “Problem is,” the CBC admitted, “there haven’t been any.” Kent said: “If a physician in another health region wished to offer therapeutic abortion services, we would encourage them to contact the Department of Health and Community Services through their regional health authority, and we could certainly look at that request.”
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He added helpfully, “It could be considered but there are no immediate plans to do so. Frankly, because there haven't been requests.”
So, not a single complaining doctor, no named victimized women, either forced to drive for hours to have their abortion or to have their unwanted baby after all; no women’s rights activists willing to complain and certainly no voices from the pro-life side.
But there was a nice portrait picture of Rolanda Ryan, owner of the province’s only private abortuary, the Athena Clinic, where 80 percent of the province’s approximately 1,000 abortions a year are done, though she had not a word to say about access to abortion in the outlying regions.
However, on the same day, the CBC put a second abortion story up, this one sourced to Ryan, featuring the same nice portrait, in which she suggests that her clinic does so much business because people are concerned about the lack of privacy at the public hospital in St. John’s, the Eastern Health Centre.
“Sounds to me like she is trying to get more business for herself,” suggested Margaret Hynes, head of Campaign Life Coalition Newfoundland. But she can’t see what the problem is. “If they are not coming, then they must not want abortions,” she told LifeSiteNews.