Canada Sees Thousands of Pro-Life Advocates Attend 11th March for Life

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Canada Sees Thousands of Pro-Life Advocates Attend 11th March for Life

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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
May 8, 2008




Ottawa, Canada (LifeNews.com) -- More than 8,000 pro-life Canadians attended the 11th annual March for Life from Parliament Hill to the Human Rights Monument to oppose abortion. The march marks the anniversary of the May 14, 1969 bill that allowed abortions.

In 1967, Canadian justice minister Pierre Trudeau presented a bill to legalize abortion and it became law in 1969.

Jim Hughes, Campaign Life Coalition president, told Sun Media that the original abortion bill “opened wide the doors to abortion in Canada."

Hughes said he was enthused by the number of teens and college students attending the march and he said it gave him hope for the future.

While pro-life advocates marched in the nation's capital, they were joined by counterparts at provincial capitols across the country.


“We've organized marches right across the country,” said Hughes. “I think it sends a great message that we're not going away and our numbers are increasing every year as more and more people become aware of what this issue is all about.”

Hughes said next year's march, which will mourn the 40th anniversary of abortion in Canada, would likely be the biggest ever.

The March for Life went on mostly without incident, although a small group of pro-abortion activists went behind the main stage featuring speakers and heckled them and shouted obscenities

Canada followed the United States by 15 years in allowing abortions to be done across the nation without any major restrictions when, in January 1988, Canada's Supreme Court ruled Canada's abortion law was unconstitutional and allowed them to be done with even fewer limits than in the U.S.


The high court there eventually ruled on an appeal abortion practitioner Henry Morgentaler filed claiming the law was unconstitutional and that abortion should be allowed without any limits.

Polling data shows Canadians are pro-abortion but pro-life groups are making inroads with their educational efforts.

A November 2006 poll Environics Research Group conducted for LifeCanada found 31 percent said human life should be protected from conception.

Another 23 percent favored protecting human life after three months of pregnancy, up from 19 percent from the previous survey. Another 10 percent said to protect human life after six months of pregnancy, down from 11 percent, and 30 percent of Canadians say human life shouldn't be protected until birth, down 3 percent.

There were 105,154 abortions performed in Canada in 2002, according to Statistics Canada.