Abortion protest causes controversy in Halifax
October 26, 2025 10:48 AM
Last week, Halifax was the site of an anti-abortion protest that has been popping up in cities across the country in an effort to shut down Canada’s Liberal abortion policy.
The protests have stirred up many questions surrounding the issue and shed light on a social divide that increasingly seems to polarize opposing views amongst citizens.
Given free speech laws permitting dissenting views on any topic, there are always inflammatory statements emerging from both camps, and this most recent event was nothing different.
Amid a flurry of controversial assertions on behalf of the protestors, a general theme stood out. Many of those who oppose abortion in Canada belong to the generation ahead of the generation X in which the majority of student-aged citizens belong.
That position widens the divide between the youth and their predecessors, as the latter seem to have taken up alloting blame for perceived abortion problems at the feet of the younger generation.
“We have a shrinking population size,” one protester declared to the Chronicle Herald, “that’s because we aren’t having babies – we’re killing them all instead.”
Another proclaimed, “It’s called self-control, not birth control,” insinuating that the new trend is to utilize abortion as a means of prevention.
The validity of these statements is surely to be questioned, particularly given the natural composition of our population, which sees the baby-boomer generation growing older and dying off. Arguably, the leading cause for the shrinking population size.
It has been recorded that in hospitals and clinics in Canada from 1996 to 2005, the rate of abortions per year has dropped from 111, 456 to 97, 254.
Statistics Canada also states, “A total of 96, 815 induced abortions were performed on Canadian women in 2005, down 3.2 per cent from 100, 039 in 2004.
As a result, the induced abortion rate edged down from 14.6 abortions in 2004 for every 1, 000 women aged 15 to 44, to 14.1 in 2005.” It is also important to assess that the basis for their arguments are perhaps faulty at their core.
According to Statistics Canada, numbers of new babies have been rising since 2005.
From 346, 082 in 2005 to 360, 916 in 2006, Canadian’s have been having more children every year. Last year, Canadians gave birth a total of 381, 382 times, nearly 40, 000 more babies than five years earlier.
In noting this, it is important to balance this information with the knowledge that our birth rates are in fact declining, and amongst the lowest in the world, ranked with Australia and Japan.
It is suggested that the reason why birth rates are decreasing is because of the financial burden associated with raising a child, thus limiting families to fewer children than in the past.
This is coupled with a rising trend of young Canadians waiting until they are older to get married and have families than was once considered the norm.
Abortion is a very heated topic all over the world and it will always be. There is significant debate pertaining to when a fetus is actually considered a human being. Many people believe it to be the moment conception occurs, while others emphasize various stages of its development as the cut-off point for abortion procedures.
Canada’s current official policy regarding abortions is, in fact, one that states that we do not have an official abortion policy.
It is believed that this open-ended policy allows for the procedure to occur in necessary instances without the federal government playing an active role in the ethically-complex decision making process.