Source: Unifor National – petition
For more information and to sign the petition click the source link
Abortion is health care
Canada must protect of abortion rights to ensure reproductive justice and gender equality. Access to safe and legal abortions is essential to an individual’s autonomy and the ability to make decisions about their own bodies.
Unfortunately, these choices are limited for too many and there are still significant barriers to accessing free, public abortion services, particularly for marginalized and rural communities. The truth remains that there are ongoing and persistent attempts to criminalize abortion here in Canada.
Join the fight
First, we protect the reproductive care that we have, then we fight to expand it!
Start by signing Unifor’s letter addressed to all Federal Members of Parliament demanding they protect abortion access here in Canada.
Then, drive the message home in your province or territory. Send a separate message to your provincial representatives demanding that they improve access and funding for reproductive care.
Please sign the emails today to send a clear message that we will not tolerate anti-choice legislation.
It is crucial to remain vigilant and continue to advocate for reproductive rights and justice to ensure that access to safe and legal abortion remains available to everyone who needs it.
Hide Political threats to human rights
With the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States, we are watching state after state restrict access to safe abortion. We cannot allow this to happen here.
To expand and secure abortion access, we need:
- Enforcement of the Canada Health Act and strong penalties for provinces that don’t provide fully-funded and accessible sexual and reproductive health care.
- Increased funding for abortion clinics in rural areas.
- Implement options such as telemedicine services for medical abortions (prescription of mifepristone and misoprostol).
By ensuring access to safe and legal abortions, we can promote reproductive justice and empower all people who can become pregnant to make decisions about their own health and well-being.
It is essential that workers act to ensure that anti-choice and anti-abortion legislation is not passed in Canada, not now, not ever. The right to choose whether to have an abortion is a fundamental human right, and any attempt to restrict this right is a direct attack on people’s health, autonomy and bodily integrity.
Unfortunately, we know that some conservatives continue to try to sneak in legislation have continuously attempted to introduce legislation designed to undermine the right to determine what happens to one’s own body and, in some cases like we are seeing in the U.S., deny life-saving health care.
In fact, there is currently legislation in our parliament aimed at criminalizing abortion:
- In 2012, Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth introduced a motion that sought to examine the legal definition of a human being, a move that many saw as an attempt to challenge abortion rights.
- In 2016, Conservative MP Cathay Wagantall introduced a private member’s bill to make it an offence to cause injury or death to a fetus while committing or attempting to commit an offence against a pregnant woman and to add pregnancy as an aggravating circumstance for the purpose of sentencing. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice at the time, Bill Blair, pointed out that abusing pregnant women was already considered an aggravating factor for sentencing purposes.
- Again, in May 2023, Wagantall resurrected her flawed private member’s bill for another attempt at creating a legal noose for reproductive freedoms with Bill C-311.
