We still don't know number of late-term abortions in Canada

By Patricia Maloney

Pro-abortion activist Joyce Arthur thinks that only 0.59 percent of all abortions performed in Canada for 2015 are late-term.

There is no way Arthur can know this, since very few late-term abortions are reported to CIHI. All we know for sure is, that based on the 19,039 hospital abortions for which we have a gestational age, there were 587 late-term hospital abortions in Canada in 2015. (an excel spreadsheet will be downloaded to your computer, see Table 4)

I've discussed this a few times before, links here. 

So let's do it again for 2015.

CIHI reported 100,104 abortions in 2015. Of these 100,104 abortions, the gestational age is only reported for 19,039 of the abortions (7,330 performed on fetuses <=8 weeks, 8,701 on fetuses 9-12 weeks, 1,585 on fetuses 13-16 weeks, 836 on fetuses 17-20 weeks, 587 on fetuses 21+ weeks). Note that these known gestational age abortions are reported only for hospital abortions--we have no gestational ages for abortions done in clinics or physician's offices. And 4,522 of these hospital abortions have an unknown gestational age.

Therefore, there were at least 81,065 (100,104 minus 19,039) abortions performed in 2015 with an unknown gestational age. This means all of those 81,065 abortions, or most of them, or some of them, or none of them, could be late term abortions--we do not know. And we don’t know these gestational ages because most abortion providers don't report the gestational ages of abortions. 

In other words of the 100,104 known abortions we only know gestational ages for 19,039 of them.

If all of the unknown gestational age abortions were in fact late term abortions, then the percentage  of late term abortions could be as high as 81%. But we don't know do we? To say that only .59% of abortions are late-term is unknowable. It is also misleading.

Even if the rate of late-term abortions was linear, then that would mean that there could be 3,103 late-term abortions and not 587 (587 is 3.1% of 19,039, therefore 3.1% of 100,104 is 3,103).

And as Suzanne Fortin wisely noted regarding the possible rarity of late term abortions:

"So what if they're [late-term abortions] rare? They HAPPEN! Murder is rare too. One is too many."