This is a challenging column. But one I needed to read. How to advance our important cause, capitalizing off the strengths of those who went before, but also include new people? All good questions, asked by my colleague Peter Stockland.
A grave statistic:
Angus Reid polling data freshly published by Cardus shows 94 per cent of non-religious Canadians now give the highest priority to personal choice when it comes to abortion or doctor-assisted death. Even among the one-fifth of Canadians who are “religiously committed,” just 56 per cent rate preserving life as a higher moral priority than personal choice.
It’s the 56% of “religiously committed” who worry me.
We have our work cut out for us. And blood is on my hands. I pay my taxes, which fund abortions, which perpetuates the normalization of abortion. It’s all very tricky. We can and must do better.
by 
You say we should do this without finger-pointing, but I, for one, think that some finger-pointing is long overdue. The reality is that there is an old guard in the pro-life movement that sees any law that is not fully protective of all unborn children as evil, as it allows for some unborn children to be killed. For them, anything less than a full-out abortion ban is unacceptable.
But the truth is that a full-out abortion ban would never fly in Canada. It wouldn’t pass in the late eighties, and it definitely would not pass now. Canadians might be uncomfortable with abortion, and some polls do show that they would support measures restricting in to early pregnancy, but an outright ban would be seen as far to strident a law for them to support. But rather than work to find common ground that would see abortion restricted in this country, the old guard of pro-life advocates drew a line in the sand and said “My way, or no way at all!”
Prime Minister Mulroney, who was supportive of sanctity of life arguments, said to those advocates–“If you insist on an all-or-nothing approach, you are going to end up with nothing!” And nothing is what we’ve ended up with. Decades and decades have passed, with nary a pro-life piece of legislation passed. There is a strong pro-choice voice in Canada, sure, which is part of the reason we are the only Western country with no abortion restrictions whatsoever. But an even bigger reason that there are no abortion laws in this country is that the old guard of pro-life advocates have dug their heels in and refused to support any kind of legislation that was less than a full-out ban.