Many poor-choicers perpetuate the myth that abortion is a constitutional right in Canada. This is simply not the case. Here's an excerpt for the Campaign Life Coalition explaining why it is not a constitutional right, only that it's been rendered legal by an overturned law...
Pro-abortion lies
Joseph Goebbels was Adolf Hitler’s propaganda chief in Nazi Germany and he famously said that if you tell the big lie often enough, people will eventually believe it. Ultimately, however, the lie was exposed and resulted in Hitler’s downfall.
In Canada, the big lie seems to be that abortion is a ‘right’ either enshrined in the constitution or created by the Supreme Court of Canada. The most prominent abortion lobby outfit is called the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, and Joyce Arthur, a pro-abortion propagandist, routinely calls abortion a ‘constitutional right.’ One such example of Arthur’s foray into untruth is a position paper from June 2005, but forwarded to MPs following the March for Life in May 2006. The paper is about the supposed medical necessity of abortion, and it she claims that abortion is “unlike any other medical procedure” because “legal, accessible abortion is also a Charter right.” She’s wrong. Read the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, abortion is not mentioned.
There was a debate in 1982 on how to deal with the issue of unborn life and, for whatever reason, it was not addressed in the actual Charter. That’s why Joyce Arthur is forced to clarify that it isn’t in the Charter itself. Instead, she claims, it is a Charter right “as per the Supreme Court’s Morgentaler decision in 1988.”
The problem is, the abortion laws of that time (which required permission from rubber-stamping therapeutic committees, which were not available in free-standing abortuaries) were deemed unconstitutional on purely procedural grounds by four of the five justices that voted to overturn the abortion law. This is a far cry from declaring a “right to abortion,” a fact noted by another judge, Bertha Wilson. She was the only justice to declare that there was an abortion right.
So what did the Supreme Court do in 1988? It ruled that the therapeutic committees were unconstitutional and it left it up to Parliament to decide to draft new abortion legislation. It did so because, in the words of one of the judges, “the court cannot presume to resolve all of the competing claims advanced in vigorous healthy, public debate.” That is, Parliament, which ostensibly reflects the will of the people, should act on the issue.
In 1991, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney introduced the fundamentally flawed C-43 which would have done nothing to reduce abortions. The bill was defeated on a tie vote in the Senate, and Parliament has ignored the issue ever since.
So there is a void in the law, with no restrictions; but neither is there a declaration of abortion as a right. That gaping hole should be filled with some law that protects the unborn from injury and lethal violence, and vulnerable women from exploitation and harm; but to do so, the politicians, the press and the public must know the truth: there is no right to abortion in Canada. In fact, if one can understand that one does not have the right to do wrong, no legitimate case can be made for permitting abortion. The lie will ultimately be exposed.
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