Prime Minister Justin Trudeau insists on recalling that his government is “proudly pro-choice”, in the wake of a video circulating on social networks where we can see him defending abortion in front of a young man who does not share not his opinion.
“With threats to reproductive rights around the world, and even here in Canada, I want to make one thing clear: we are never going to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her body, because we are proudly pro-choice, and we always will be,” he said in a video posted to his various social media accounts on Saturday.
Mr. Trudeau chose to make this clarification following an exchange that went viral during his visit to Winnipeg on April 12 for a public meeting at the University of Manitoba.
On the sidelines of this event, Mr. Trudeau was confronted by a self-proclaimed supporter of the People’s Party of Canada, who began to challenge him on his position on abortion. The conversation was caught on video and soon ended up on Reddit and elsewhere on the internet.
The young man notably declared that the Liberal Party’s support for the right to abortion made him “un-Christian”.
When the Prime Minister asked his interlocutor if he believed that women should have the right to “choose what happens to their own bodies”, the latter simply replied: “Personally, no. »
The back and forth continued. Mr. Trudeau then asked the young man if he believed that women who are raped can, in his opinion, be justified in having recourse to abortion, which made him hesitate.
The prime minister ended up patting the young man on the shoulder, saying, “It sounds like you need to think and pray a little more about this. »
Mr. Trudeau has received praise on social media for his handling of the situation, but by his own admission he has received several reactions since the video has been circulating on the web.
“I had a lot of comments and suggestions from friends, colleagues and supporters who said to me: ‘You could have said this, you should have said that more. “So I wanted to take a moment to really get our position straight,” he said in his video from Saturday.
The Liberal leader then listed some measures taken by his government to defend abortion, particularly with regard to access to the abortion pill and to sexual and reproductive health care.
“In the House of Commons, when a Conservative MP, in 2021, introduced a bill to restrict access to abortion, the Liberals voted against it,” he recalled, referring to the bill. Saskatchewan MP Cathay Wagantall’s “sex-selective abortion” law.
Abortion rights are a topic that came back into the news when the United States Supreme Court struck down the abortion rights guarantees contained in the landmark “Roe v. Wade,” in June 2022.
More recently, some US courts have attempted to restrict access to the abortion pill, but the nation’s highest court has decided to stay those judgments while the issue works its way through the legal system.
With information from Mickey Djuric