Why I Am Not an Abortion Doctor

By Paul Ranalli, MD, FRCPC
February 7, 2008

In this photo, Dr. Paul Ranalli speaks to a group of medical students about fetal pain at Canadian Physicians for Life's 2007 Medical Students Forum, held in Toronto, Nov. 30 - Dec. 2, 2007.

On Monday, the National Post printed the transcript of a speech delivered recently by Garson Romalis, a Canadian abortion doctor who has shown remarkable personal courage in pursuing the practice of his choice -- abortion -- despite two violent physical attacks against him in 1994 and 2000. Dr. Henry Morgentaler, similarly, has endured many public protests and several jail terms in his successful quest to change the face of medicine and Canadian society. I am not certain I would be so steadfast in my belief in the face of such trauma.

I happen to disagree with what they are doing. I also condemn the personal threats and attacks on them by a radical few whose actions are the antithesis of promoting life and have left a blot on the mainstream pro-life movement. This is a blot that abortion advocates -- and their supporters in much of the media -- have exploited repeatedly to try to silence the reasonable moral arguments against abortion and its unrestrained practise in Canada today. The "violence" has stopped. Indeed, recent uncivil actions all seem to be on the pro-choice side: the trashing of a peaceful pro-life display at a B.C. university, and the recent defacing of pro-life bus shelter posters in Hamilton, Ont., which had the audacity to show a pregnant woman.

Following the 1988 Supreme Court Morgentaler decision that struck down Canada's old abortion law, abortion advocates imagined a new medical nirvana in which fired-up young doctors, including the many women who now form a majority of many medical school classes, would flood to the clinics and hospitals to fill the abortion doctor vacancies. After all, the Romalis and Morgentaler generation is now greying and could use an infusion of troops. But that never happened.

To explain this fact, abortion proponents often cite the threat of violence. But this tactic is becoming increasingly threadbare. Moreover, doctors' reluctance to become abortion specialists can no longer be traced to any legal threat, as there is no law against the practice. In fact, most Canadian abortions are covered by medicare.

No, the pro-choice movement refuses to confront the main reason doctors do not gravitate to performing abortions: They don't like to kill. Even putting aside "pro-life" doctors, many of those physicians who would nominally sign off as "pro-choice" would prefer that someone else per-form abortions.

Abortion advocates bemoan a "lack of access" to abortion. Some of it is a less than honourable attempt to politicize the well-known limitations of our public health system. (For example, they point to a lack of access to abortion in P.E.I., a largely rural province that lacks many different types of specialized services.) No, the real concern behind the lack of access talk is that they know there are not enough young doctors with the unique zeal of the old lions like Romalis and Morgentaler,

Even if many young doctors do not possess strong moral qualms about killing the unborn, they likely see abortion as outside the medical mainstream in a number of other ways. Doctors who exclusively practise abortion are still not popular within the profession. And the procedure is used as a weapon of genocide against female fetuses in a number of ethnic communities in Canada, an especially bitter truth for feminists to swallow.

While I realize the practise of abortion is not going to go away anytime soon, the real question now is why there are no limits on the practise in this country. To put it in the language of "rights," so favoured by those who oppose any limits on abortion, why is there no right to fetal protection at any stage in pregnancy? Dr. Romalis hearkens back to the 1960 complications of septic abortion. I would go back a little further, to 1490, when our current legal understanding of fetal personhood (the "born-alive" rule) was encoded.

Dr. Romalis closes by recounting the story of a female medical student who came up to him to thank him for performing an abortion on her some years earlier. She said, "If it weren't for you I wouldn't be here now." For balance, I would ask about the many future women doctors who were aborted in the womb. To quote Robert Kennedy: "I dream of things that never were, and ask why not."

Dr. Ranalli is a neurologist at the University of Toronto and an advisor to the De Veber Institute for Bioethics and Social Research. This article was first published in the National Post, February 7, 2008.