The Ontario NDP is pushing a controversial motion to have the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) cover the cost of all prescription contraceptives, including oral hormone pills, copper IUDs, implants and the abortifacient drug called Plan B.

The motion will be debated at Queen's Park on November 29th.

For reasons I’ll explain below, Campaign Life Coalition opposes this idea. However, the NDP’s motion has grown legs...

Unfortunately, Doug Ford’s Health Minister, Sylvia Jones, is signaling that the PC government may actually support making these contraceptive pills and devices free.

These items, whose purpose is to safeguard sexual lifestyle choices, have never been deemed to be “medically necessary” for the treatment of an injury, illness or disease. Scientifically speaking, we know that pregnancy is not an injury, illness or disease, which is why contraceptives have always been (properly) excluded from OHIP coverage for most Ontarians.

NDP putting sexual politics ahead of medical needs

The reality is that Ontario’s health care system is cash-starved, and in the process of collapsing financially.

Huge numbers of preventable deaths are occurring from cancer, cardiac problems, and other diseases because people are languishing on long wait lists to see specialists, get diagnostic screenings, and receive urgent surgery.

This comes down to money. The province simply doesn’t have enough money to solve the health care crisis... and the problem is getting worse all the time, as we now hear of things like ambulances not being available.

More than 2.2 million Ontarians currently don’t have a family doctor, with that number expected to climb to more than 4 million by 2026.

Again, this comes down to a lack of money to recruit, train, and hire more doctors, and to maintain competitive salaries.

"Hallway healthcare", a disgraceful reality in our emergency rooms, has been normalized. A 4-hour wait in the hospital is now seen as “fast”, compared to the sometimes eight hours or longer that many critically ill patients must endure.

It’s gotten so bad, that people have left the ER before being seen by a doctor because they got tired of waiting, and then, tragically, died at home soon after.

Patients are also dying because they can’t afford life-saving cancer drugs that OHIP won’t insure because of their high cost. Some Ontario cancer patients are forced to crowd-fund from friends and relatives, to try to pay out-of-pocket for these life-saving drugs.

There are 23,000 autistic children languishing on waiting lists for Early Intensive Behavioural Intervention therapy, which, if started young enough, can make a dramatic, life-ameliorating difference in outcomes. The cost of EIBI therapy per child can be $90,000+ a year, hence the excessive wait list.

And don’t even get me started on the shortage of MRI machines and skilled technicians who can operate them!

Given this short list of examples of the unmet need in genuine health care, often life-or-death situations, why is the NDP trying to divert hundreds of millions of scarce taxpayer dollars towards something so unimportant – and so medically unnecessary - as contraception?

Based on BC’s projected spending on “free" contraception, which it pegged at $119 million over three years, we can reasonably estimate the Ontario government would have to spend $338 million, because our population is almost three times larger.

Why would Doug Ford’s Minister of Health, Sylivia Jones, be interested in supporting this ludicrous NDP motion?

The pool of healthcare dollars is finite in size. If the Ford government diverts $338M to IUDs and birth control pills, which health care sectors will consequently get $338M in cuts?

Will it be senior care? Oncology departments? Autistic children?

The big lie of “health care cost savings”

The motion's proponents are busy pushing the lie that “preventing unwanted pregnancies will reduce health care costs”, but don’t believe them.

The truth is that each child born represents a huge economic benefit to society over his or her lifetime, due to income taxes they will eventually pay, sales taxes, and other wealth-producing effects of their presence in the workforce.

We are already incurring an enormous demographic cost from the 4 million Canadians killed by abortion since 1969. By now, most of these missing individuals would be in the workforce, paying taxes and generating national wealth.

For example, the 100,000 children aborted annually would pay at least $500 million dollars in income taxes alone after their first year of employment.⁽¹⁾

This lost tax revenue would help keep dying government programs afloat like Medicare, Old Age Security and the Canada Pension Plan, all of which are facing bankruptcy.

Some years ago, one analysis calculated the lost tax revenue from the missing, aborted Canadians as $2 billion dollars a year, assuming annual income of $25,000 and a 20% tax rate.⁽²⁾

Giving away “free" contraception could make this worse, by further driving down Canada’s dismal birth rate.

Many contraceptives also pose health risks for women.

Even the World Health Organization, for instance, lists combined Estrogen-progestogen oral contraceptives (like the pill) as a Group 1 carcinogen (i.e. a known cancer-causing agent, which increases a woman’s risk of breast and cervical cancer).

Other side effects include blood clots, depression, etc. Therefore, giving away “free" contraception would likely only increase health care costs.

Free contraceptives will result in more abortions

Artificial contraception is not only against God's plan for love and the procreation of new human life, the contraceptive mentality is also one of the root causes of abortion.

In fact, the use of contraceptives leads to more, not fewer abortions, as all the research bears out.

As individuals in a society become reliant on contraceptives, they'll inevitably turn to abortion as a “back-up birth control method” when contraception eventually fails, as it's prone to doing.

If Ontario makes contraception even easier to access, it could cause the number of abortions to actually increase. That means more babies will be killed in their mothers' wombs.

Would it surprise you to learn that even abortion advocates admit the link between contraception use and abortions?

“Most abortions result from failed contraception,” stated Joyce Arthur, founder and executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada.

In 1973, Dr. Malcolm Potts, former medical director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, predicted: “As people turn to contraception, there will be a rise, not a fall, in the abortion rate.”

Even in 1955, the controversial sexologist Alfred Kinsey stated that “we have found the highest frequency of induced abortions in the groups which, in general, most frequently uses contraception.”

According to studies conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, more than half of American women seeking abortions report using a contraceptive method in the month they became pregnant.

As pro-lifers, we must resist any law or regulatory change that increases the number of pre-born children killed. But this shouldn't be a concern solely for those who identify as pro-life.

You will often find “progressive” politicians who give lip service to the idea that that they want to “reduce the number of abortions”. So, if they’re honest, even socially liberal politicians who hold to Bill Clinton’s line of “safe, legal and rare”, should oppose OHIP providing free contraceptives, because it’ll inevitably increase the number of abortions.

It must also be noted that many contraceptives have an abortifacient mechanism of action. They can kill human embryos, not just prevent the sperm from meeting the egg. For example, they can thin the endometrium - the lining of the uterus - which can prevent the embryonic human from implanting.

Take Action: Email & Call Your MPP

Use our Action Alert Email program to quickly send your elected representative and Premier Ford an email, tweet, or phone call. Express your concerns about the NDP’s motion to divert scarce healthcare dollars towards free contraceptives through OHIP.

Click here to send an Action Alert Email now.

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