7. If elected, will you support legislative or regulatory measures to explicitly exclude abortion as an insured health service under the Canada Health Act?

A large majority of abortions are elective and for convenience as even leading abortion rights advocates have admitted.

Abortion is the most common elective surgery and is one of the most publicly funded and protected elective medical procedures. As well, abortion and the free provision of abortifacients such as the abortion pill RU-486 and the morning after pill are some of the least effectively regulated, serious medical procedures or medications.

The removal of public funding of abortion services has, in countries or US States that have done so, resulted not in more “back alley” abortions, but rather in a substantial drop in the abortion rate. This indicates our current, mostly free and exceptionally easy access to abortion has encouraged more women to use this service as a form of birth control.

This reality does not deny the fact that many women do indeed experience emotionally trying unintended crisis pregnancies but there are other options that should be presented to these women other than the usual government funded abortion-only option.

It is often stated that abortion must be funded under the Canada Health Act since it is a medically necessary service. Abortion, as we have already stated, is overwhelmingly elective, and never medically necessary.

Under the Canada Health Act, the individual provinces have the authority to determine which procedures are medically necessary. However, for many years, the federal government has violated that provision by demanding abortion be deemed medically necessary. Provinces that have resisted this have been threatened with the removal of large amounts of federal health care transfer payments if they persist in not funding or not fully funding abortion.