OP-ED: Inside Canada’s late-term abortion regime

"The videos show how easily late-term abortions are obtained. No medical justification required. No extraordinary circumstances. Just a date, a signature, and a hospital referral."

Source: Wikimedia Commons

By: Richard Dur

The video begins the way horror usually does: quietly.

A receptionist’s voice, flat and casual. A hidden camera captures only fragments: a countertop, the waiting room chairs, framed certificates on the wall. It could be a dentist’s office. A walk-in clinic. Any place where ordinary rituals of life take place.

Except the conversation is not ordinary. And what unfolds here is not a ritual of life, but of death.

“…Canada doesn’t have a limit. Our limit is 24[weeks], but there’s a hospital… they don’t have a limit… The law in Canada… doesn’t have a ‘too far.’”

“Your health has to be in danger? ...they don’t ask you anything? You don’t have to prove you’re at risk?”

“No, absolutely not.” “Just let us know and we refer.”

The employee’s tone is perfectly calm. Routine, even. A woman 22 weeks pregnant is asking about ending the life of her preborn child on the cusp of viability, for no reason whatsoever, and the response is as monotone as confirming the time of her next appointment.

This scene plays out in Toronto. Then in Montreal. Then in Vancouver. Three cities. Three clinics. Three nearly identical conversations.

The grainy undercover footage doesn’t shock with gore or screams. It doesn’t need to. Its horror is deeper, born from the quiet of routine. Late-term abortions in Canada can be arranged with the same energy as booking a haircut.

The videos show how easily late-term abortions are obtained. No medical justification required. No extraordinary circumstances. Just a date, a signature, and a hospital referral.

The casualness is the first unsettling piece of the story.

The second comes from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), the independent national agency that compiles hospital discharge data. And this is where the quiet dread becomes something else entirely.

Every year, Canada performs hundreds of late-term abortions after 20 weeks.
Most years, it’s over a thousand.

These aren’t theoretical figures. They’re the hospital’s own numbers – clinical, coded, and impossible to wish away.

Most hospitals use induction – induced labour and delivery – after a feticidal, heart-stopping injection is administered to still the heartbeat of the fetus. And sometimes, despite the intent of the procedure, the child is born alive.

The CIHI data captures this as well; buried a little deeper in its tables are the lines marking how many of these late-term abortions end in a live birth. (CIHI lists 123 live-birth outcomes in Canada, excluding Quebec, last year.)

What CIHI does not capture is why those abortions were performed. Politicians and pro-abortion activists, though, assure the public that late-term abortions “almost never happen,” and if they do, they occur only in dire medical emergencies.

The videos say otherwise. And so does the data.

A 2023 Quebec study found that nearly one in three abortions between 20 and 29 weeks (30.9 percent) were performed for “other” reasons – not for fetal anomalies, nor for life-threatening maternal emergencies.

The reality matches exactly what the undercover videos show: late-term abortion in Canada is often elective.

In most every horror story, there is a moment when the reader realizes the monster is not outside the window - it’s already in the room. Since 1988, when the Supreme Court struck down Parliament’s abortion law – not to enshrine abortion as a right, but to compel legislators to act – Ottawa has done nothing. For nearly four decades, federal legislators have abandoned their responsibility.

But federal inaction is not an excuse for provincial silence. The Criminal Code is federal, but the delivery of health care - including clinical protocols and newborn care standards - is entirely provincial. Health care is a provincial jurisdiction.

Take Alberta, for example. For late-term abortions after 21 weeks, Alberta Health Services (AHS), recommends “induced fetal cardiac arrest prior to initiating the termination procedures” – a step taken to ensure the baby dies in utero, by stopping the baby’s heart.

However, if the injection is not administered, is administered incorrectly, or otherwise fails to stop the heartbeat, the baby can be born alive. This possibility is openly acknowledged by AHS policy, which directs staff to enter a “do-not-resuscitate order” in anticipation of these live-births.

This is not theoretical. last year, CIHI recorded 133 late-term abortions in Alberta, including 28 infants born alive following the late-term abortion procedure.

Policy HCS-183-01, which governs all premature deliveries in Alberta, spontaneous or induced, states “a non-interventional approach is recommended.” In other words: infants born below a fixed gestational threshold in Alberta are not to receive active medical care.

The monster here is not a person. It is a process.

And Alberta’s Premier cannot claim ignorance – Danielle Smith wrote about these very cases in a Calgary Herald column on November 23, 2000 – twenty-five years ago – when she wrote: “Nurses used to induce labour then withhold fluids from the baby until it died. Now they inject sodium chloride into the fetus’s heart, killing it before inducing labour.” (sic – the practice she describes as past tense continues today.)

It appears that the real horror is not only what you discover when you open the forbidden door, but how many people already knew what was behind it and did nothing.

And now that you know, the question turns to you:

The question is no longer whether this is happening in Canada. It is whether anyone will act now that the truth is in the room with us. Will you?

“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never again say that you did not know.”
–William Wilberforce

Further documentation is available at LeftToDie.ca.