I noticed something very interesting during our court session on Wednesday. The government's lawyer, throughout his arguments to the judge, kept bringing up the notion of defunding abortion.
Remember that one of the government's arguments is that I can still meaningfully comment on abortion without having accurate abortion statistics, or abortion costs or all the myriad things associated with abortion like abortion policy, gestational ages, repeat abortions, etc.
Not only did their lawyer argue that I could still comment on abortion without this information, he also raised what other pro-life people talked about and blogged about in the context of abortion as well. They could also comment on abortion without this information. (Also interesting that other groups and websites were entered into evidence when our case had nothing to do with them.)
So why this continual mentioning of how many of us would love to defund abortion, which also had nothing at all to do with my case? Why keep bringing it up?
I think this finally brings us to the heart of why the Ontario Government chose to hide abortion information in the first place. And it has nothing to do with their health and safety argument (more on that later). By their forcing us to rely on CIHI's very under reported abortion statistics (CIHI reported 23,746 while the government reported 45,471 for one year.) and not on actual performed abortions, the government is worried that our calls to defund abortion might finally get more traction from the public at large, if they only knew just how much we spend on abortion each year in Ontario.
For instance at $1000/abortion relying on CIHis numbers, that would be $23,756,000 compared to $45,471,000 spent on abortion in one year only. (This is an estimate of course, because we don't know the actual cost per abortion. In fact we are perpetually forced into estimating the cost of abortion because we don't have access to that information). That's public money spent on one medically unnecessary medical procedure. And it's almost twice as much as we thought it was. And it's completely hidden from the public.
With the Liberal government in such a mess financially, that's a lot of money to spend, year after year, after year, after year, on the willful killing of innocent, defenseless human beings.
This is the real reason the Ontario government decided to hide abortion information: they really don't like us talking about defunding abortion. Seems like their lawyer did us a favour.
Very interesting Patricia. The fact that Ontario's lawyer focused on pro-lifers' efforts to defund abortion--when that's not what the case was about!--tells me that the Ontario government is very uncomfortable about how it funds so many abortions every year (no questions asked) and that it doesn't want to be put into a position of having to defend this practice, because it doesn't know how to! So they just hide the data and make a bogus argument about "safety and security concerns." At least we now know what really motivated Ontario to censor this information.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to defend the indefensible. Better to just cover it up and hope nobody notices. And people said that Stephen Harper had a hidden agenda on abortion. Of course in the end Harper didn't have a hidden agenda. Kathleen Wynne and her Liberal government seem to have been unmasked in their own hidden agenda: keep the public in the dark on what our government is doing about, and spending on, abortion.
ReplyDeleteThis is very good ammunition for the Opposition! Have the Progressive Conservatives called the Liberal Premier out on this yet? Remember the gas plant scandal and the deleted emails? Censoring all information about abortion is no different, really, than deleting those emails. Both prevent transparency and accountability in government. Yes, the PCs could really make hay with this one!
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