by Jonathon Van Maren, The Bridgehead
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.