Time for a change?

I saw this on the back of a bus a couple of weeks ago:
May 29th, 2004

You usually don’t see the abortion issue as “in-your-face” as this and it’s nowhere near as prevalent as in the United States. Sure there’s a pro-life group (and I don’t particularly like that term) right around the corner from my building. But I don’t see them distributing material every time I walk past them. I sometimes see people picketing in front of the hospital but I don’t see people shooting other people who want to get an abortion. Mostly the abortion issue remains hidden from sight (though that could certainly change after the election).

Another thing that struck me was that that seems like quite a few abortions per year (almost 80,000). Or rather I assume that the number they’re showing there is 2 million instead of 20 million because 20 million would be far too high. Fortunately though I can look at the Statistics Canada website and search for induced abortions and come up with this page. According to that page there were 106,000 abortions in 2001. That translates to about 15 abortions per 1,000 women. I suppose that might seem high when you look at the raw numbers but what the numbers quoted don’t illustrate are the circumstances surrounding these abortions. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your view of the issue), emotions and reasons can’t be boiled down into nice figures that can be splashed on the side of a bus.

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