The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada has released an excellent report, “Black Holes: Canada’s Missing Abortion Data: A Brief Examination of Canada’s Abortion Data Collection Policies and an Analysis of Ontario’s New Legislation.” It provides context and history and debunks the argument usually offered for keeping the public in the dark about the number of abortions done in the publicly funded health care system (the claim that releasing such figures would lead to anti-abortion violence). We’ll have fuller coverage of the EFC report in the September edition of the paper.
Last week Claire Hoy wrote about this issue in the Caledon Citizen and said “It’s all politics, pure and simple.” And the politics extends to media coverage. Hoy noted:
And speaking of newspaper coverage, as far as I can tell, both the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail, both editorially very proabortion, haven’t even bothered to report this story – odd, given the reams of coverage they gave last year when Stephen Harper announced an end to the long-form census. They treated this cutback on statistics as a national tragedy. But abortion statistics, hey, who cares? All of which goes to show that politicians have no monopoly on hypocrisy.
Politics, pure and simple.
