Thousands Attend Pro-Life March in Canada, Want New Abortion Debate

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   May 11, 2006   |   9:00AM   |   WASHINGTON, DC

Thousands Attend Pro-Life March in Canada, Want New Abortion Debate Email this article
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
May 11, 2006

Ottawa, Canada (LifeNews.com) — Several thousand pro-life advocates participated in the national March for Life in Canada to express their pro-life views. They want the federal government there to reopen the debate on abortion, but even with a new Conservative government, that’s unlikely to happen.

The pro-life advocates converged on Parliament Hill today and called for new laws limiting abortion.

They were encouraged when at least a dozen Conservative and Liberal members of the Canadian Parliament and several senators addressed the crowd. They told the marcher to keep up their fight against abortion.

However, Cambridge, Ont. Tory MP Gary Goodyear said he wasn’t aware of any bills filed to prohibit abortions.

During the election campaign, Conservatives campaigned on the pledge that they would not alter the nation’s current abortion laws. After the elections, Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper said it was a "lie" that members of the Liberal Party were advancing that he would reopen the nation’s abortion debate.

In an interview with Maclean’s magazine, Harper blamed members of the opposition party for claiming he and his Conservative government have a "hidden agenda" to make abortion illegal.

"There’s no evidence that it’s true," Harper said.

"And it will become very apparent now that I am prime minister that this argument was a lie. And it will not be me having to explain this next time. It will be the other party, when it engages in misrepresentation," the Prime Minister explained.

“The Conservative government won’t be initiating or supporting abortion legislation, and I’ll use whatever influence I have in Parliament to be sure that such a matter doesn’t come to a vote,” Harper said in published reports. “I will use whatever influence I have to keep that off of the agenda, and I don’t see any likelihood of that in the next Parliament."

Harper also noted that a Tory majority could only exercise limited power in Ottawa because of a Liberal-dominated Senate and a bureaucracy appointed by the Liberal government.

Still, pro-life groups want to see abortions limited and hope the Harper administration will help.

Mary Ellen Douglas, president of the pro-life group Campaign Life, has said her organization would like to end taxpayer funding of abortion and stop the dangerous abortion drug RU-486 that has killed five women in the U.S. and injured almost 950.

Related web sites:
Campaign Life Coalition – https://www.campaignlifecoalition.com