On Feb. 2 Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff called upon Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper to include abortion and contraception in the proposed plan for G8 nations to improve maternal and infant health across the world. “Women are entitled to the full gamut of reproductive health services,” Ignatieff told a Liberal-sponsored roundtable discussion on foreign aid (CTV.ca, Feb. 2/10)

            Ignatieff urged Harper not to follow the lead of the United States which under President George Bush had cut all U.S. financing to pro-abortion groups working overseas. However, Ignatieff did not seem aware that pro-abortion President Barack Obama ended that policy in January 2009. Today the United States gives $300 million a year in direct grants to United Nations’ overseas programs for sterilizing women or the killing of babies in the womb.

            Ignatieff’s call for more abortions, and contraception worldwide, inspired no doubt by the feminist clique in his party, ran into immediate opposition, none of which was reported by the pro-abortion media.

            Only the National Post and the news agency LifeSiteNews found it appropriate to report. it. Press releases were issued immediately by Campaign Life Coalition, Catholic Civil Rights League, REAL women, Canadian Physicians for Life, 4MyCanada, and others including this magazine (see below).

            These, in turn, were followed by public protests from Toronto’s Catholic Archbishop Thomas Collins (http://www.archtoronto.org/pdf/stateg8matchildhealthfeb410.pdf) and Catholic Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary. Bishop Henry was quoted in the National Post as saying: “I thought it was pathetic for a political leader to suggest that abortion is somehow tied to the health of women and children,” said Bishop Henry. “It was a particularly crass remark in light of all the orphaned children we now see in Haiti. It was absolutely incredible that he would say that and he is alienating religious people with these comments. This will not win him votes” (Nat. Post, Feb. 4/10)

            The National Post’s attacked Ignatieff in its editorial “Planned Propaganda” (Feb. 4). “Mr. Ignatieff,” it said, “is staking out an absolutist pro-abortion ideology beyond any taken previously by his party. Even most pro-choice advocates stop short of casually lumping abortion in as just another uncontroversial” contraceptive method “as Mr. Ignatieff appears to have done.”

            One Liberal MP, Paul Szabo (Mississauga South) also protested. The issue, he pointed out, had not been discussed in caucus at all. “There are many of my colleagues in the Liberal caucus who will protect the unborn,” he stated (LifeSiteNews.com; CTV.ca, Feb. 2).

Caution

            The Harper’s proposal, meanwhile, is still an unknown quantity. No details have been published and the fact that Canada’s international agencies may have been the inspiration for this proposal is not re-assuring. Many of them such as UNICEF are pro-abortion. And, to our knowledge, Canada’s foreign policy, which under Liberal governments fully supported United Nation’s pro-abortion policies, has not been changed so far by the Conservatives, after four years in power.

            One positive step by the Harper government reported by the monthly newspaper The Interim (Feb. 2010) is that over the last four years it has slashed the annual handouts to Planned Parenthood from $2.3 million in 2005 to $9,000 in 2009.

            “Planned Parenthood” (PP) and “reproductive technologies” are euphemisms for pro-abortion policies, as most readers will know. Canada’s PP recently changed its name to the Canadian Federation of Sexual Health. Although heavily political, it has charitable status with Revenue Canada when it should not have.

Reminder