CLC Blog

After months of pressure and public debate, Quebec Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette announced on February 20 that the controversial article that would enshrine the “freedom” to obtain an abortion would be removed from the draft Quebec constitution. 

Georges Buscemi, president of Campagne Québec-Vie (Quebec Life Coalition), a group that warned against constitutionalizing the destruction of preborn life, welcomed the news. 

“It's a great relief for me to see this enshrinement dropped,” he told Campaign Life Coalition. “I think that, in the long run, this has preserved Quebec from making a terrible mistake.”

Efforts to permanently lock abortion into the province’s highest law received pushback from both pro-life and pro-abortion groups.

Minister Jolin-Barrette stated in an open letter published on Feb. 20 in Le Journal de Montréal that he wanted the purpose of adding abortion to Quebec’s future constitution was to make clear that “the state protects women’s freedom to have an abortion.” But pro-abortion groups opposed the move, arguing that enshrining abortion could open the door to limiting it in the future. 

Buscemi made this very point in interviews with corporate media last December. “The only thing is that it adds something concrete, a kind of target to take down,” he told Quebec paper Le Devoir, adding that such an addition to the proposed constitution “would certainly be another rallying point” for pro-life groups like his. Buscemi’s interviews were enough to fuel the fears of pro-abortion activists in Quebec and give them the confirmation they were looking for that constitutionalizing abortion was a bad idea. 

It was a strange role the pro-life organization played in this matter. When it acknowledged that the abortion article could serve as a motivation to oppose abortion, the media suggested that “anti-choicers” would “rally around this clause” and that its inclusion would serve as a target for the group to challenge. “They made it seem, in fact, as if we were in favour of this clause being included, when obviously we were not,” said Buscemi.  

He said he would have liked to see the article dropped for the right reasons. “Primarily, the justice minister removed the abortion clause to appease the nearly unanimous call from feminist and pro-abortion groups to remove it: their fear was that any inclusion of abortion in law—any inclusion, under any pretence—would make abortion vulnerable to legal restriction.”

“In short, I believe that the removal of the abortion clause was the work of God's providence. He used the insatiable appetite for abortion of Quebec's ruling class to fuel a movement to remove a clause that, for them, did not protect abortion enough. So we see both God's providence—his protection of Quebec from the stain of enshrining abortion—but also his radical freedom—that he allows people to sink so far into depravity as not only to want to keep abortion legal but to pretend that the killing of babies in the womb is a banal act, unworthy of being under the purview of law.”

The truth is that ending the life of another human being can never be a right—not for anyone, anywhere. Pro-life Canadians are grateful to see abortion removed from Quebec's proposed constitution.