I will confess that when Pat Maloney, the Canadian pro-life blogger responsible for tireless exposés of this country’s abortion regime, sends out another report, I almost hesitate to click on it. For over a decade, Maloney has revealed that each year, babies in Canada are born alive as the result of abortions and left to die. And each year, journalists and politicians studiously ignore her reporting.
When Maloney first broke the story in 2013 that at least 491 babies had been born alive, there was an outcry. Three Canadian MPs sent a letter to the RCMP calling for an investigation into these revelations. The press covered it, too. The National Post’s grim headline summed it up: “Birth of a legal quandry: Live-birth abortions a perilous grey zone in Canada’s criminal code.” It was “perilous,” of course, because Canada permits abortion until birth. Abortion supporters, however, rushed to defend the practice. As the Post put it: “Doctors say that it is too much to assume that 491 live-birth abortions represent the killing of otherwise healthy babies.”
Since then, Maloney’s reportage has been largely ignored. The revelation that babies were perishing outside the womb caused a brief flicker in the collective conscience; abortion supporters rushed to pooh-pooh the story and assure everyone that this was “morally defensible” and nothing to worry about; Prime Minister Stephen Harper blithely responded by reiterating that abortion is legal in Canada; and almost everyone moved on. Maloney, however, has continued to detail the butcher’s bill.
Her latest report, from April 29, details the latest data:
That is 642 late-term born alive abortions in just five years.
That is 5,738 late-term stillbirth abortions in just five years.
She noted that these numbers “are most probably grossly underreported because [the Canadian Institute for Health Information] only publishes numbers from nine provinces and the three territories,” and that Quebec’s numbers are absent. Maloney has not yet received a response from CIHI on what that is:
‘In Quebec, induced abortions during the second trimester of pregnancy result in a live birth more than one in ten times (11.2%). Of these live-born fetuses, one in ten survives more than 3 hours. These are the findings of a study published in June 2024 in the scientific journal American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (AJOG).
The study was based on all second trimester abortions (13,777) performed in the hospitals of Quebec between 1989 and 2021. In Quebec, the law does not stipulate a maximum time limit for performing an abortion. The researchers found that abortions performed during the second trimester of pregnancy due to fetal anomalies doubled between the period 1989 – 2000 and 2011-2021. At the same time, they observed a significant increase in live births following a second-trimester abortion: the rate of 4.1 live births per 100 abortions in 1989-2001 climbs to 20.8% for the 2011-2021 period.
This is particularly true for abortions between 20 and 24 weeks of amenorrhea (18-22 weeks of pregnancy): in this case, more than one fetus in five is alive at the time of expulsion (21.7%).’
Maloney emphasized that the data debunks a key and consistent deceit of abortion activists: That late-term abortions are virtually always performed due to “fetal abnormalities” or the medical condition of the mother. This is not the case. 48% of late-term abortions in Quebec were actually performed on health babies, for “personal or unspecified reasons.” As Maloney reports:
‘The study showed that in 48% of second trimester abortions in Quebec, i.e. almost half the cases, there was no medical indication on the fetal side, nor any medical emergency on the maternal side. In these cases, the abortion took place for ‘personal or unspecified’ reasons, on a healthy fetus.’
It is worth noting, once again, that a 2009 Angus Reid poll found that 92% of Canadians did not know that abortion was legally available throughout all nine months of pregnancy. Every year in Canada, babies die outside the womb as a result of abortion. Every year, healthy babies that are viable outside of the womb are killed inside the womb. During last month’s election, the federal party leaders mentioned abortion only to emphasize their support for this horror show. When you consider that fact, the reality is that Canada got the government it deserves.
I pray to St. Ann that this abomination will end.