As surely as day follows night, the time will come when one or more private members’ bills on abortion find their way to the floor of Parliament.
When that happens, it will almost certainly be at the initiative of a Conservative MP.
Anti-abortion feelings run highest within Stephen Harper’s caucus and the other main federal leaders are on the record as supporting the right of a woman to choose to terminate a pregnancy.
In this Parliament, a bill to severely restrict or eliminate that right would be dead on arrival.
The rejection earlier this spring of a Liberal motion instructing the prime minister to include contraception (including abortion) in his G8 maternal health initiative did not offer an accurate reading of the mood of the current House on the issue of domestic access to abortion.
By their own admission, pro-choice Conservative MPs voted against the Liberal motion on the basis of its wording, not its intent. A number of pro-choice Liberals were also absent for the vote on their party’s motion.
But in a future Parliament dominated by a Conservative majority, the outcome might be different. And if a prime minister is to be judged by his deeds rather than by his words, one should not count on Harper to stand against the anti-abortion tide of his caucus.
While the prime minister continues to maintain that he has no desire to wade back into the abortion debate, his government’s actions on the maternal health front are rightly seen by the Canadian anti-abortion lobby as its biggest victory in decades.
Harper has used the negative vote on the Liberal motion to justify his refusal to fund international efforts designed to help Third World women secure safe abortions, and that decision has energized his anti-abortion MPs.
If and when one or more bills on abortion do materialize, they will not be modelled on the Tory legislation that foundered on a tie vote in the Senate in the early 1990s.
The bill drafted by then-justice minister Kim Campbell dealt with access to abortion within the parameters of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and it was deemed too permissive by the bulk of the anti-abortion lobby.
But a bill that more severely curtails access to abortion would be overturned by the courts on charter grounds, or at least it would be unless the government of the day sheltered it under the notwithstanding clause of the Constitution.
When all is said and done, no federal party would be politically suicidal enough to sign on to a blanket suspension of some of the charter rights enjoyed by Canadian women.
Hence, the next legislative battle on abortion involves securing legal rights for the fetus.
In the last judicial round on abortion, that ball was left in the court of Parliament. Anti-abortion strategists argue that if the fetus had legal standing, its right to life would trump a woman’s right to choose to end a pregnancy.
It is possible that a majority of Canadians could be brought around to the notion of granting fetuses legal rights as of a given stage of a pregnancy, especially since the vast majority of abortions performed in Canada take place early in pregnancy. But there is little mainstream support for a comprehensive ban on abortion and even less provincial appetite to try to enforce restrictions on the procedure.
In the four decades since a jury first refused to convict Dr. Henry Morgentaler for providing abortions on demand, most provincial governments have become more sympathetic to a woman’s right to choose.
Given that, a Parliament that used the back door of fetal rights to shut down on-demand access to abortions would almost certainly hit a wall in one or more provinces. In time, such a plan would likely turn out to be as unenforceable as the dispositions that were belatedly struck from the Criminal Code a bit more than two decades ago.
Chantal Hebert writes for The Toronto Star Syndicate.