Bush's Victory Gives Canadians Hope.

The smashing electoral victory of President George W. Bush warmed the hearts of pro-life people across Canada, who can now look forward to an improved climate of protection for the unborn south of the border. We can only stand in awe at the political power achieved by the Movement in the United States.

While Canadian pro-lifers face a bevy of obstacles, there is more pro-life support north of the border than may be apparent to Americans who know only that there is no law restraining the practice of abortion in Canada. The media here routinely trot out a decade-old poll result commissioned by pro-abortion groups that found 79% agreed with a statement that abortion should remain a "private matter between a woman and her doctor."

Yet a new poll reported in early November found that 33% of Canadians believe human life should be protected from conception, and a further 24% say protection for the unborn should begin after the third month. It is fair to conclude that a majority (57%) would oppose abortion after the first trimester. This is hardly satisfactory, but it is sharply at odds with how abortion is treated in the law.

To repeat, there is no law against abortion at any stage in pregnancy, right up to the moment of delivery at nine months. In fact, one judicial precedent was established in the province of British Columbia in the late 1980s. Two midwives were found not criminally negligent in the tragic death of a nine-month-gestation baby during birth. The verdict was not because they were innocent, but because the full-term healthy unborn baby was not deemed a person under the definition of the Criminal Code.

Canada's lawless state of abortion began when Liberal Party Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau engineered the legalization (with mild restrictions) of abortion by slipping the law in as a line item into a large omnibus bill in 1969. Trudeau essentially achieved with this sleight-of-hand for Canada what the Roe v. Wade decision rendered in America four years later. Even this weak law was struck down by the Canadian Supreme Court in 1988 as being unduly "restrictive."

[Some U.S. commentators, shocked by the election result. have published stories of Kerry supporters who threaten to flee north to Canada. Indeed, the now-famous red state/blue state map of the U.S. reveals the interesting pattern of Kerry-friendly states hugging the Canadian border across the Northeast and Great Lakes/ Midwest, plus the West Coast. So there is a political affinity between U.S. states and their northern neighbors.]

But Canadian champions of life face two further daunting structural obstacles. First, there is nothing like ...