Is Justin Trudeau passionate about abortion because of his own family history?

By Jonathon Van Maren

January 10, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Yet again this week, Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party are in the news over an issue they enjoy accusing the Conservatives of wanting to raise: Abortion.

This time, it is because of a requirement in the application process for Canada Summer Jobs Program funding—that all organizations attest that they support abortion on demand, among other things.

The backlash has begun, although considering the fact that Trudeau has previously declared that no pro-life Canadian can run for Parliament as a Liberal, this move is as predictable as it is disgusting.

That Justin Trudeau is “pro-choice” is no surprise, but one has to wonder where his passion for abortion comes from.

• He pledged $81 million to the UN Population Fund, which funds abortion.
• He pressured Prince Edward Island to begin offering abortion on the island by threatening to withhold federal health funding.
• In response to Trump’s defunding of abortion services overseas, he announced an abortion fund of $650 million for developing countries to make up for the lost cash.
• On a visit to Ireland, Trudeau pushed Irish leader Leo Varadkar on the legalization of abortion—and Varadkar declared himself a feminist after claiming that Trudeau had explained what that meant to him.
• And the Liberal government insisted that a female Conservative MP could not become chair of the Status of Women committee because of her pro-life views.

Previous Liberal prime ministers have been universally pro-abortion, but none of them have exhibited the level of passion Justin Trudeau has for the abortion cause. Some who have actually spoken to Trudeau about the issue have told me that he sees it as one of his most prized principles, and that abortion is far more than just another line item on the progressive checklist for him.

Trudeau, as his actions in the short time he has been prime minister prove beyond a doubt, intends to use his time in office to expand abortion access in Canada, fund abortions in developing countries, and recast pro-life Canadians as second-class citizens without the same access to government programs as everyone else.

So where did this passion come from?

Shortly after Trudeau’s election in October of 2015, I took a look at one of the reasons: The Trudeau family is one that is deeply rooted in the Sexual Revolution. Pierre Trudeau was the one to decriminalize abortion in 1969, although his belief in restricting the procedure would have rendered him ineligible to run in his son’s Liberal Party. Despite Pierre’s tumultuous marriage to Justin’s mother Margaret—he gave her black eye at least once—his sexual appetites remained legendary, and he even flaunted his girlfriends to his young wife (she was thirty years his junior) as their marriage broke down.

Most significantly, when Pierre fathered a daughter with lawyer Deborah Coyne at the age of 71, he took pains to inform Coyne that he had no desire to be a parent to his only daughter, even discouraging them from living in the same city as him. His “pro-choice” approach to parenting was hugely indicative.

But the key to understanding Justin Trudeau’s passion for abortion may lie not with his father, but with his mother.

Margaret Trudeau expressed her support for abortion and birth control very early on, saying that her views on those issues were “very liberal.” Later, in a train-wreck interview she granted to Playgirl in 1979 that Vanity Fair would refer to as “one of the biggest mistakes of her life,” she recounted, among other things, that she’d had an abortion at age 17. One wonders if the fact that the half-sibling of Justin Trudeau was aborted the year before Margaret met Pierre at age 18 has ever given Justin any pause—or if that revelation has informed or solidified his own abortion support.

Margaret, like Pierre, had rather schizophrenic views on abortion. After giving birth to her own children—Justin himself being the first—she noted that, “Because I have been pregnant and given life, I find that personally, I really believe a child to be alive from the moment it is conceived—that’s a mixture of spiritual and physical feeling. That doesn’t mean I don’t think that women should have abortion made available to them. I can certainly see many instances when it really is the best way.”

One wonders if she is referring to the abortion of Justin’s half-brother or sister here.

Any pro-life activist can tell you that one reason people become resolute in their support for abortion is because someone they love very much has had one—and as such, they equate supporting abortion with supporting their loved one. The discussion about abortion suddenly becomes a very personal one.

And according to Jonathan Kay, much about Justin Trudeau can only be explained by his relationship with his mother. As the ill-fated marriage between Pierre and Margaret collapsed noisily, Margaret hit the road to live a whirlwind life of drugs, drinking, and promiscuity, attempting to outrun or self-medicate her mental health issues and struggles with depression. The tabloids lapped it up, and photographs of her dancing in Studio 54 made headlines in Canada. She toured with rock stars, had affairs with prominent celebrities, and became a cultural symbol of the Sexual Revolution.

Occasionally, she came home to see her boys. As Kay wrote after working with Trudeau on his memoirs:

What remains in my memory are the stories from his childhood. It’s one thing for daddy to leave. That happens all the time, sadly. But when mommy walks out, that’s something very different. We are conditioned to think of a mother’s love as the one unshakable emotional pillar of a child’s life. When that pillar folds up and walks out the front door, how do you keep the roof from collapsing?

Many ordinary people never recover psychologically from that kind of rejection. And Justin’s case was far from ordinary—because the whole world knew he’d become motherless. There she was, on the pages of sleazy magazines, partying it up in skimpy clothing at Studio 54. Trudeau’s classmates showed these photos to him at school. Lots of boys endure “yo momma” taunts. Not all of them come with a glossy, full-colour appendix.

A need to deal with maternal rejection doesn’t just define Justin Trudeau. It defines the attitudes of people around him. Once you enter his world and know something of the emotional pain he experienced as a youth, the knowledge knocks the metaphorical silver spoon out of his mouth. What good is the glitz of being a prime minister’s son when you’re living a childhood parched of mother’s milk?

Trudeau and his mother, of course, famously repaired their relationship as Margaret came to realize the impact mental illness was having on her behavior and sought help in what would become a very public journey. But as Kay notes, her actions—and departures—have done much to create the man who now serves as Canada’s prime minister.

Trudeau adores his mother, and obviously adored his father as well. One has to wonder: Did his father’s actions and lifestyle and his mother’s confession to Playgirl magazine about her own abortion inform not only Trudeau’s beliefs, but his passion for abortion? Did these circumstances develop Trudeau’s conceptualization of abortion not as a “necessary evil,” as some politicians would phrase it, but as a genuinely good thing?

We can only speculate, of course. The evidence is circumstantial, although an examination of Trudeau’s childhood and background tells us much about the prime minister he would become. There is tragedy inherent in the Trudeau story: Little boys left without their mother after a marriage publicly collapsed, an aborted half-sibling they never met, and a little girl rejected by her father, who did not even want to reside in the same city as his daughter.

Justin Trudeau has chosen to champion the Sexual Revolution and the abortion carnage that has resulted from it, but his own history provides us with a cautionary tale and highlights the ugliness and heartbreak that accompanies the so-called freedoms progressives like to celebrate.

The final tragedy is that Justin Trudeau has learned all the wrong lessons from his family’s history.