Dr. Jordan Peterson: “I certainly believe that abortion is morally wrong.”

By Jonathon Van Maren

Four years ago, I wrote a column about Dr. Jordan Peterson’s response to a question about abortion at one of his lectures. At the time, Peterson noted that he believes “abortion is clearly wrong,” but observed that the abortion issue is, in the vast majority of circumstances, nestled within the larger problem of the sexual revolution. Peterson was intentionally ambiguous about what the legislative response to abortion might be, and I suspect he was simply trying to stay out of the news.

I’m not sure how I missed it, but this week while researching a different abortion-related column I stumbled across this 2018 interview between Peterson and Faytene Grasseschi, in which they discussed a range of socially conservative issues. During their discussion, Grasseschi asks Peterson about abortion, and he articulates his stance much more clearly.

“I certainly believe that abortion is morally wrong,” he states. “I think it’s something you do after you’ve done a bunch of other things that you shouldn’t have done, and I don’t see any way out of that argument. You find yourself in the position of needing abortion when you’ve made a lot of very serious moral errors already.”

Peterson goes on to say that the best political approach to the abortion issue is to determine where the consensus is and to legislate there—banning late-term abortion, for example, or sex-selective abortion, something the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus and several political pro-life groups have been working on for some time. As journalist Jonathan Kay noted during the Election Night livestream CCBR hosted with Right Now, the political debate on this issue has become almost airtight, with every major political party ignoring the fact that a consensus allowing for legislation exists, making Canada a uniquely fanatic country on this issue.

Anyway, here’s the clip—give it a watch: