Prime Minister Justin Trudeau insists 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’re never going to tell a woman what she can or can’t do with her body, because we are proudly pro-choice, and always will be,” he said in a video posted to his various social media accounts on Saturday.
Mr. Trudeau chose to make this update following an exchange that went viral when he was in Winnipeg on April 12 for a town hall 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.
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 an abortion, which made him hesitate.
The prime minister ended up patting the young man on the shoulder, saying, “Looks like you need to think and pray a little more about this. »
“I had so many 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 abortions” law.
Abortion rights are a topic that came to the fore in the news when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the abortion rights guarantees contained in the landmark “Roe v. Wade,” in June 2022.
More recently, some American courts have tried to restrict access to the abortion pill, but the highest court in the country has decided to suspend these judgments while the issue works its way through the legal system.
