Make your voice heard on assisted suicide

There will be public consultations on assisted suicide in Ontario.

Citizens are invited to attend the consultations, take a survey, or email your thoughts to the Ontario government.

How can Justin Trudeau present himself as being Catholic?

From SHEILA GUNN REID at Rebel Media:

"I'm pro-life. I believe that a unique and precious human life exists at conception. 

I say I believe it but what I mean is that I know it to be true, ethically, medically and spiritually. 

"We never really knew how Stephen Harper felt on the subject personally. He never proclaimed anything the way I just did. But as a man of principle, he realized that abortion is a matter of conscience. Stephen Harper understood that for many people, people like me, being pro-life is a matter of our very salvation. Asking us to be pro-choice is like asking us to literally sell our soul. So when the issue of opening up a debate about when life begins arose, Stephen Harper did not whip the vote. How could he ask anyone to put their soul on the line for the party? 

But that’s what Justin Trudeau is doing. He insisted all of his MPs be pro-choice. 

Trudeau made being pro-choice a condition for being given the green light to run as a Liberal party candidate. He really did. I'm not a theologian but I am a lifelong Catholic. 

Trudeau's position is a strange one for a man who presents himself as publicly Catholic and moreover it's totalitarian. How could anyone demand that a person of faith choose the Liberal party over their own moral convictions?"

"Defending" Planned Parenthood - haha

Sometimes social media is awesome. 

Why the Ontario Government had to hide abortion statistics

"In my view, to deny access to generalized, non-identifying statistics regarding an important public policy issue such as the provision of abortion services would have the effect of hindering citizens' ability to participate meaningfully in the democratic process and undermine the government's accountability to the public." 
                                   Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, 2000

I think I've finally figured out why the Ontario government refuses to answer my questions about why they hide abortion information. It is because Kathleen Wynne et al cannot use the reason that not releasing the information is to protect the safety of a person or building. That was the argument the Ministry of Health used in 2000. And the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner didn't buy it.

So this time around Kathleen and friends simply changed the law to exclude abortion information completely from the prying eyes of nosy citizens. And while the opposition Conservatives snoozed, the Liberals quietly changed the law.

Pretty ingenious really.

Of course we know the government's real reason was pure politics: they don't like pesky pro-lifers asking them about abortion.

You see, in 2000, the Ontario Ministry of Health tried to withhold information when a (presumably pro-life) group requested abortion billings through a Freedom of Information request. The group asked for:

"the number of therapeutic abortions billed to OHIP in each of the years 1993 to 1997"

The Ministry refused to release the information. It defended its actions on the grounds that pro-lifers are violent:

"The Ministry submits: [B]ased on past and continuing events, there is ample evidence to support a reasonable expectation that disclosure of the requested information could endanger the life or physical safety of various individuals as well as endangering the security of the facilities where abortions are performed, and, in the course of violent demonstrations, the security of public buildings such as the Queen's Park legislative or other government buildings. 

Harassment has been, and remains, a reality in Ontario for those involved in the abortion debate from a Pro Choice perspective [notice the bias here against pro-lifers. Because no, no, no, pro-choicers are never violent]. Since 1991, this harassment of patients, providers, staff and their family members and neighbours by Pro Life activists has, in some instances, escalated into violence...

...The context in which these and other violent events have occurred is one liable to be fed by the slightest provocation. Even data reflecting merely the total number of abortions performed in Ontario on an annual basis, or the total number of providers performing them, is at risk of being manipulated and presented to the public in the most inflammatory way possible. 

The ministry is not suggesting that the appellant may manipulate the data in this way. We are merely pointing to the realistic conclusion that a disclosure to the world@ (see Order M-96 and others), by whatever means, is much more than hypothetical in the circumstances of this Appeal. It cannot be ignored that the appellant is a member of the media, from whom wide public circulation of the requested information can be expected. The eventual recipients of the information would doubtless include many individuals and groups on both sides of the abortion debate, a number of whom may elect to employ acts of harassment, vandalism and/or physical violence against persons with whom they disagree or of whose behaviour they deeply disapprove. This is why disclosure of the particular records in this Appeal, unlike those at issue in Order P-1545, would alter the current situation in a way sufficient to raise the reasonable expectation of the harms in clause 14(1)(e) and (i).  

But the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner did not agree with the Ministry's arguments in its decision, and ordered the Ministry to release the abortion information:

"Pursuant to a request under a freedom of information statute, the Supreme Court of Illinois in Family Life League v. Department of Public Aid, 112 Ill. 2d 449 (1986) ordered disclosure of (among other information) the numbers of abortions performed by providers, rejecting arguments that disclosure would lead to threats and harassment. 

Like the B.C. and Ontario cases, the U.S. authorities suggest that generalized statistical data regarding abortion services should be accessible under freedom of information legislation. The information at issue in this appeal consists of general statistical information on a province-wide basis. This information cannot be linked to any individual facility or person involved in the provision of abortion services. I do not accept that the sequence of events, from disclosure to the harms outlined in sections 14(1)(e) and (i), could reasonably be expected to occur. While I accept the Ministry's submission, supported by ample evidence, that individuals and groups on both sides of the abortion debate have been subjected to threats, intimidation, and acts of violence, in my view, any link between disclosure and the harms in these sections is exaggerated. The evidence before me does not establish a reasonable expectation of endangerment to the life or physical safety of any person, or to the security of a building, vehicle or system or procedure established for the protection of items within the meaning of sections 14(1)(e) and (i) of the Act. 

This finding is in keeping with a fundamental purpose of the Act, as recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada: 

"The overarching purpose of access to information legislation, then, is to facilitate democracy. It does so in two related ways. It helps to ensure first, that citizens have the information required to participate meaningfully in the democratic process, and secondly, that politicians and bureaucrats remain accountable to the citizenry . . Rights to state-held information are designed to improve the workings of government; to make it more effective, responsive and accountable . . . [Dagg v. Canada (Minister of Finance) (1997), 148 D.L.R. (4th) 385 at 403, per La Forest J. (dissenting on other rounds)]. "

In my view, to deny access to generalized, non-identifying statistics regarding an important public policy issue such as the provision of abortion services would have the effect of hindering citizens' ability to participate meaningfully in the democratic process and undermine the government's accountability to the public." (Emphasis added)

As we know from my own attempts to get abortion information, we have never been given a reason why Ontario government changed the law. Of course they could never say it is because of violence, because the IPC already ruled against that argument in 2000.

The government could never use that argument again, because clearly they would be overruled.

ARPA's Lighthouse news

Check out this week's edition of ARPA's Lighthouse News.

Last week, ARPA released the latest in its series of “Respectfully Submitted” policy papers.  This one deals with Climate Change. On the feature this week, ARPA policy analyst Colin Postma outlines some of the highlights of the paper, and responds to some of the criticism it has generated.

In the news, Trinity Western University had another victory last week in its efforts to establish a law school at its campus near Langley, BC. The BC Supreme Court overturned a decision by the Law Society of BC which would have prevented graduates from TWU’s law school from practicing in BC. The ruling re-instates an earlier decision which would allow the school to go ahead.

ARPA was an intervenor in this case and on the program this week, we talk with lawyer André Schutten about the Court’s ruling and what it may mean in the broader context of an issue that seems quite likely to be headed to the Supreme Court of Canada. 

The Canadian Institute for Health Information has released some more abortion statistics. The total number of hospital abortions done across the country in calendar year 2014 was 33,931; that was down slightly from the 35,003 the year before. However, the figures are incomplete, because they don’t include a whole swath of statistics which are being deliberately repressed by Freedom of Information laws in at least two provinces. We speak with pro-life blogger Patricia Maloney about the numbers.  

A church youth group near Chatham Ontario put up a pro-life display last month. 1000 crosses in a field – each one representing 100 babies aborted in Canada every year. Vandals knocked down every cross on the weekend of December 6^th. Those crosses are back up now, and the youth decided to make the rebuilding project about more than just the original intent.  

Also on the program this week, some expressly Christian analysis of Donald Trump’s plan to bar all Muslim immigrationinto the U.S.A. as a way to fight terrorism. We speak to Dr. Scott Masson from Tyndale University College in Toronto about what Trump’s posturing has done to the broader context of the U.S. Presidential race.

The anti-choice pro-abortions

Jeff Durham (of Molly Matters) wonders why Joyce Arthur et all don't like Bill C-484, Unborn Victms of Crime. (Jeff tragically lost his wife and unborn child in one go to murder.)

In fact Durham wonders if ARCC is really anti-choice:

How can any reasonable person who claims to advocate for the choice of a woman call a law that would make it so that the choice was only hers “anti-choice”? 

What is your true agenda? How can you put forth no effort to defend the choice of one woman when it is violated? Or the choice of all of the women who were murdered when they were carrying a child? 

How can you conscionably tell people that to protect what a woman has chosen would take away their right to make a choice? 

If it is not the choice of women that you defend, who’s choice exactly is it? 

Are you even conscious of your contradiction? 

Canada is waking up to your double talk. 

Molly was Cassie’s choice and Molly matters."

Calling the pro-abortions anti-choice makes complete sense. Because the only choice they ever advocate for is the choice to dismember, decapitate and disembowel pre-born babies. The pro-abortions almost never advocate for adoption or, for women to keep their baby heaven forbid.

I also got a good chuckle out of Fake Person's indignant tweets to Jeff Durham about his blog post which she clearly didn't like--she tweeted him at least five times with the very same link to some bill the pro-abortions would support. As if Durham was an imbecile and one tweet wasn't enough.

When Ken Epp first introduced his Unborn Victims of Crime Bill Joyce Arthur wrote a lot of nonsensical stuff on the bill. Ken Epp provided some excellent rebuttals to Arthur. It's funny how often pro-life people have to always spend time correcting Arthur. Well it's not really funny, but you know what I mean.

Which magazine will you read this Christmas?

Mary the most powerful (pro-life) woman who ever lived on Earth, will be on, and in, the December issue of National Geographic magazine.

"National Geographic’s December cover story, “How the Virgin Mary Became the World’s Most Powerful Woman,” details how Mary’s “image and legacy are found and celebrated around the world.” The issue is currently available at print newsstands as well as online."

We don't even know what Mary looked like. And of course, it doesn't matter does it? Because for Mary, her power and her appeal don't come from her looks.

Then there's Justin Trudeau, the most "pro-choice" person who ever lived on planet Earth, on the front cover of Vogue.

Pro-abortions make more stuff up

Joyce Arthur didn't like Jonathon Van Maren's article about Robert Lewis Dear who opened fire near and inside a Planned Parenthood near Colorado Springs, Colorado, resulting in three fatalities and nine other casualties.

Joyce thinks that pro-lifers incite violence. I wonder what she calls what Planned Parenthood does when they dismember, decapitate and disembowel children?

So she wrote this as a rebuttal. I think that's what it is.

Fake Person liked what Joyce Arthur wrote. Not sure what FP is saying in her post, but there are a lot of words on it.

Jonathon's subsequent response to Joyce Arthur.

By Jonathon Van Maren

In the wake of the murder of three people, including a pro-life pastor, and the injuring of nine others, Canada’s abortion activists are predictably falling all over themselves to assert that pro-lifers are “terrorists” by virtue of the fact that we highlight the legal killing of pre-born children. Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada responded to my column on the shootings as an “incitement to violence” in and of itself, and the lovely Fern Hill, a pseudonymous blogger, wrote up a profile of the “typical pro-life terrorist” with similar accusations and her signature name-calling. Robyn Urback in the National Post accused GOP candidates who had the gall to mention that Planned Parenthood is guilty of all sorts of horrifying actions against pre-born children of being partially responsible for the murders, as well.

There’s a few things to note here. First of all, this marks the first time that many of Canada’s abortion activists and their media friends took any notice of the Planned Parenthood baby parts scandal at all, so there’s that. They only poked their heads over the battlements of their pro-abortion media bubble when they sensed the chance to lay corpses at the feet of those who tirelessly expose those being killed by the abortion industry.

Second of all, reading through these blog posts would be funny if the accusations were not so serious. It seems that the air-tight skulls of Fern Hill and the rest of the aging feminist vanguard simply cannot understand that some people do not think violence is the answer to everything. The pro-abortion worldview is one based on the very simple premise that violence—the physical destruction of a human being developing in the womb—is the answer to virtually every imaginable situation. Whether it be economic circumstances, a failing relationship, not feeling ready to parent, sexual assault, or medical difficulty, abortion is always the answer. So when a deranged recluse opens fire from a Planned Parenthood in Colorado—shooting, it must be said, without seeming to target anyone specifically—it’s understandable that they look at their ideological opponents in the abortion debate and assume that we’re taking a page out of their playbook.

They simply do not understand the pro-life view: For all their delusional babble about pro-lifers “hating women” (what about the nearly half of American women who are pro-life?), the pro-life movement is opposed, consistently, to using violence in any circumstance. We do not respond to inconvenience or disagreement with violence. That’s the modus operandi of the other side.

It’s interesting how the regular violence against pro-lifers on both sides of the border—including a knife attack at Life Chain in Toronto, pro-life activists getting punched, shoved, and otherwise assaulted by those of the pro-choice worldview, and even instances of pro-life activists getting shot—pass by without even a whisper from abortion activists. In many instances of violence, comments on social media indicate that they feel this is rather righteous blowback against those who dare to show pictures of abortion victims. There’s another irony—abortion is so grotesque and so violent, that according to abortion activists, even showing pictures of it constitutes violence—but for those exposing the deed rather than those committing the deed.

Pro-lifers are aware that the pro-“choice” movement is so desperate to project the violence of their worldview back on to the pro-life movement that they will blame us for virtually anything that they can, while ignoring any violence that doesn’t fit their semi-literate blog diagnoses of what we actually believe. That’s why when abortionist Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia got caught delivering babies alive and then snipping their spinal cords with scissors, the abortion movement promptly blamed pro-lifers, insisting that restrictive laws had forced Kermit to kill with scissors and run a seedy operation, while in fact a nice, clean, sterile clinic could have done the abortions if pro-life laws demanding such things hadn't stopped them. Regardless of innumerable stories of born-alive infants being killed after birth and a cadre of Kermits committing the deeds, abortion activists like Fern Hill, Joyce Arthur, and others happily look away—unless they can find some way to blame pro-lifers for the killing of infants that should have been aborted a few hours earlier, in the womb.

I’d like to make one final point, one already made eloquently by pro-life speaker Scott Klusendorf: Referring to abortion as “killing” is not “violent rhetoric.” It is actually just quoting the abortion industry itself. A few examples he cited:

Dr. Warren Hern, author of Abortion Practice, the medical text that teaches abortion procedures, told a Planned Parenthood conference: “We have reached a point in this particular technology [D&E abortion] where there is no possibility of denying an act of destruction. It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current.”

As far back as 1970, a candid editorial in California Medicine, a journal sympathetic to abortion, highlighted the use of deceptive language: “Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra-or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected.”

Ronald Dworkin, in his book Life’s Dominion, says abortion deliberately kills a developing embryo and is a choice for death.

Faye Wattleton, former President of Planned Parenthood, told MS Magazine in 1997, “I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus” (“Speaking Frankly,” May/June 1997).

And hundreds more examples could be cited. Dr. Utah Landy, in the leaked Planned Parenthood footage, noting that abortion involved “dismembering the fetus” and laughing about when an eyeball dropped on her lap. Dr. Cassig Hammond saying in the same video that he knew one fetus could not have been born alive because “we crushed its skull.” Another abortionist openly admitting that abortion victim photos are real. “I actually have a different response when someone portrays those images,” she said. “Actually that’s my week…some weeks–and that’s what it looks like. Ignoring the fetus is a luxury of activists and advocates. If you’re a provider, you can’t ignore the fetus, right, because the fetus is your marker of how well – how good a job you did…Let’s just give them all the violence, it’s a person, it’s killing. Let’s just give them all that.”

This is violent language, yes. But what pro-lifers are doing is accurately quoting those in the abortion industry. This is not anti-abortion propaganda. It is pro-choice practicality. When pro-lifers are accused of “violent rhetoric” simply for accurately describing—in many cases quoting abortionists—what happens during the abortion procedure, you know that this procedure is truly grotesque.

That’s why the frenzied and hysterical accusations of abortion activists don’t bother me. They can call my colleagues and I “terrorists”—but at the end of the day, it’s simply because they cannot understand those who see violence as the problem, not the solution. 

CIHI releases 2014 abortion statistics

CIHI released their 2014 abortion statistics today. Like last year they are in Excel format.

2014 total abortions were 81,897 compared to 82,869 in 2013. But of course, as usual, clinic data is incomplete and still no abortions reported for doctor's offices and BC clinic data is also incomplete.

There were 540 clinic abortions reported in NB in 2013, but clinic data is absent for 2014.

In 2014 Newfoundland and Labrador reported 867 abortions, but in 2013 Newfoundland and Labrador's clinic abortions were absent.

From CIHI:

"Hospitals are mandated by their provincial/territorial ministry of health to report all hospital activity (not limited to abortions); therefore, coverage of abortions performed in Canadian hospitals can be considered complete. However, there is no such legislative requirement for clinics to report their activity (reporting is voluntary). For 2014, clinic data for British Columbia is incomplete, and clinic data for New Brunswick is absent."

Pro-abortions should stay true to facts

Today in the National Post Robyn Urback complains that pro-life people are being hard on Planned Parenthood. She says:

"Back in July, a series of controversial videos emerged purporting to show that Planned Parenthood was profiting of the sale of aborted fetal tissue, which is illegal, though the tapes actually went only so far as to confirm that the organization was being reimbursed for transport costs associated with donating tissue to medical research, which is legal."

It seems that like most "pro-choice" people, Ms.Urback probably never even bothered to watch the Planned Parenthood undercover videos. If she had, she would have been aware when there were negotiations between PP employees and the undercover person taking the videos, about the prices that would be charged for the fetal body parts. If the costs were truly only for transport costs, well then negotiations would not be needed would they? This is selling for profit pure and simple.

Ms. Urback also feels that calling Planned Parenthood an abortion factory is "morally disingenuous and utterly incorrect". Wow. Does she really believe that? What else does one call the systematic, repeated slaughter of children before they exit the womb if not an abortion factory? 

What is morally disingenuous is not only the killing of these children, but making a profit from it. Unfortunately there are far too many people of the "pro-choice" persuasion who simply can't see this. Or maybe they don't want to see it.