OP-ED: Alberta babies born alive left without care in 17 late-term abortions

Richard Dur writes, "Seventeen babies were born alive in Alberta following labour-induced late-term abortions in 2025 and left to die."

Photo by Visualss on Unsplash

By: Richard Dur

Richard Dur is the Executive Director of Prolife Alberta.

There is a particular kind of sentence that does not require embellishment. It does not need adjectives. It does not benefit from rhetorical inflation.

It simply needs to be stated plainly – and then be allowed to do its work:

Seventeen babies were born alive in Alberta following labour-induced late-term abortions in 2025 and left to die.

That’s it. That’s the sentence.

Seventeen. Seventeen babies. Seventeen times. In Alberta. In 2025.

Born alive and then?

No life-sustaining intervention. No automatic presumption in favour of care. No clear, system-wide requirement that birth triggers a clinical reset. Instead, within the system administered by Alberta Health Services, the response is shaped in advance: a non-interventional pathway, established before the child is even born, and carried through after the child is. This is not a failure of the system; it is how the system is designed to function.

If that sounds implausible, it is only because it contradicts what we take for granted in a supposedly civilized society.

One might have assumed that the great dividing line in this debate – the one invoked endlessly, the one treated as decisive – is birth itself. That whatever moral, legal, or philosophical disputes exist prior to that moment, they resolve, decisively, when a child is born alive.

That assumption would be wrong.

In Alberta, birth does not necessarily settle anything.

But don’t take my word for it. It is there, in black and white, in Alberta Health Services policy: PS-92 and HCS-183-01.

Under Section 223 of the Criminal Code of Canada, a child born alive is a legal person. It is the baseline upon which every other protection rests.

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And yet, here we are, confronted with a system in which that legal transformation can be acknowledged in theory while quietly disregarded in practice.

We are told, of course, that this is complex. That those raising concerns are simplifying what ought not to be simplified. But some things resist complication.

If a child is born alive and is a legal person, then the presumption must be care. Care proportionate to the child’s condition, certainly, but care nonetheless.

Nor are our provincial elected officials unaware of this. What demands an explanation is why they still allow it to continue.

As a columnist more than 25 years ago, Danielle Smith called such second- and third-trimester abortions a “horrific practice,” describing how “nurses used to induce labour then withhold fluids from the baby until it died.”

Today, as Premier, she presides over the system in which it continues. (Seventeen times in the past year alone, in fact).

If being born alive does not trigger a presumption of care, what exactly does?

Because if the line between unborn and born is to mean anything at all, it must mean something here.

And yet - seventeen times last year - it meant nothing at all.

No rhetorical flourish required.

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