(Ottawa) The Minister of Health, Jean-Yves Duclos, and the Minister for Women, Marci Ien, have the mandate to review the legal framework surrounding the right to abortion in order to solidify it. During the election campaign, the Liberals had promised to introduce a financial penalty automatically applicable to provinces that limit access.
Posted at 11:33 a.m.
Updated at 12:41 p.m.
“A woman’s free choice belongs to her alone,” Prime Minister Trudeau reiterated before the weekly Liberal caucus meeting, the day after the shock wave caused by the leak at the United States Supreme Court. The document revealed that a majority of judges intend to overturn Roe v. Wade who has been protecting abortion rights south of the border since 1973.
“All women in Canada have the right to safe and legal access to abortion and Canada, our government, will never back down in defending women’s rights here at home and around the world,” he added.
Access to abortion remains difficult in New Brunswick, where the Progressive Conservative government refuses to fund this procedure in a clinic in Fredericton, the only one in the province to offer it. For it to be covered by health insurance, women must turn to one of the three hospitals in the province, in Moncton and Bathurst, to obtain a voluntary termination of pregnancy with the delays that this implies.
In 2021, the federal government withheld $140,000 from the province’s health transfer because it refuses to fund abortions in private clinics.
“We are openly looking at what more can and should be done to ensure that all women have this free choice across the country,” said Mr. Trudeau, adding that his government was funding studies to compare the access to abortion from one province to another.
A few weeks before the last election campaign, Ottawa awarded a grant of $366,000 to the University of New Brunswick for a study on the challenges women face in obtaining an abortion in the territory.
“In addition, I asked Minister Duclos and Minister Ien to follow up to see what the legal framework is that we could improve, that we could need to ensure that not only now, but that under any other government in the future, women’s rights are protected. »
He recalled that last year, 45 million were donated to organizations working for reproductive health across the country.
The Liberals’ election platform contains four promises to guarantee the right to abortion. In addition to adopting regulations under the Canada Health Act to improve access to abortions, they pledged $10 million for Health Canada to develop a portal with “accurate, non-judgmental” information on reproductive rights, up to $10 million over three years to local organizations and to eliminate the charitable status of anti-abortion groups.