While the abortion debate in Canada remains far from the tumultuous boil of the late 1980s, its temperature has been increasing. The closure of New Brunswick’s only abortion clinic, Justin Trudeau’s decision that new Liberal candidates must support a pro-choice position and the intensified political efforts of the anti-abortion movement are just a few of the signs suggesting that abortion may remerge as a mainstream political issue.

Some abortion rights advocates will likely not welcome this, worrying that this might open the door to new restrictions. We don’t agree. A renewed debate might not only serve to further solidify abortion rights (since offence is sometimes the best defence). It might also be an opportunity to press politicians to finally reduce the remaining barriers to access across Canada.

To achieve this, however, abortion rights advocates must engage in the public debate and effectively disprove the new arguments and rhetorical strategies used by the anti-abortion movement.

Anti-abortion pundits have begun to use a wide variety of new(ish) rhetorical strategies over the last decade. In the context of the New Brunswick struggle, several have become particularly important. One strategy is to attempt to represent abortion as highly contested in public opinion. Claiming that for every woman that supports abortion access there is one against, anti-abortion pundits seek to gain legitimacy for their position by suggesting that they are merely representing a widely popular position in public opinion.

This is inaccurate. Polls consistently show that the vast majority of Canadians not only support abortion rights, but also do not want the status quo policy of medically-regulated abortion access to be re-opened and re-politicized. In fact, polls from 2012 suggest that the more that Canadians are exposed to the abortion debate, the more they support abortion rights.

To explain away these inconvenient facts, anti-abortion debaters frequently imply that political and media elites suppress anti-abortion views and that there is a widespread “pro-abortion” bias and peer pressure in society. They attempt to win sympathy by painting the anti-abortion movement as an oppressed, marginalized, social justice movement muzzled by an amorphous but powerful pro-abortion elite. A version of this argument was used to claim that Trudeau’s policy decision tramples on freedom of speech. Such an approach can be effective because it resonates both with past civil rights movements and the populist political language so popular of late in the U.S. and Canada.

While this technique makes for easy and sensationalist anti-abortion columns, however, it is profoundly inaccurate. Anti-abortion views are regularly found in mainstream media outlets. Just last year, for example, the vast bulk of mainstream media outlets strongly expressed outrage that Mark Warawa’s Motion 408 was not allowed to come to a vote. With regard to Trudeau’s announcement, political parties generally enforce strong party discipline on the vast majority of policy issues — and there is no reason why abortion should be exempt from this.

Moreover, when it comes to undue societal judgment on women and their reproductive choices, it has been pro-choice advocates who have been the strongest proponents of the idea that women should be free of political and social pressure when making their reproductive decisions. And the policy solutions championed by these advocates — ensuring that reproductive choices are personal, non-political decisions taken by a woman and her medical provider — have mirrored this commitment.

In contrast, by attempting to turn this health issue into a highly contentious and moralized political issue, it is the anti-abortion movement whose actions risk dramatically increasing the weight of peer pressure and public judgment on women.

A third tactic increasingly used by anti-abortion advocates is to claim that abortion harms women. Like any medical procedure, it is true that abortion carries with it some risks and it can often be an emotional experience. Still, it is clear that the risks of abortion are much lower than both continued pregnancy and most other routine surgical and medical procedures Canadians never think twice about accepting.

Furthermore, studies have consistently proven that prohibiting abortion simply drives it underground and creates both disastrous macro health outcomes for women and enormous financial costs for the official health care system (due to the follow up care that is inevitably required). This is why abortion rights advocates argue that the best solution is an equitable and accessible system that ensures that women can make their own reproductive decisions in consultation with their qualified medical providers (with more, not less, medical support before, during and after abortion care).

In other words, Canada’s policy of providing legal, accessible and publicly funded abortion access, as well as the demands to improve current levels of real access and support, are justified by a wide variety of ethical, medical, public policy and legal arguments that are even more persuasive today than 30 years ago.

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With two of the three major federal parties supporting abortion rights and the third attempting to avoid discussing it, favourable political conditions seem to be emerging. This is a reflection of the state of public opinion — after all, Trudeau clearly sees supporting abortion rights as a politically strategic move. All that is needed now is for civil society groups who strongly support abortion rights to vigorously and publicly re-invest and re-engage in this political debate.

Paul Saurette is an associate professor at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on twitter @paulsaurette. Kelly Gordon is a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa. Their book, The Changing Voice of the Canadian Anti-Abortion Movement, will be published later this year.

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