TORONTO, October 12, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — The president of Canada’s national pro-life political lobby group is asking the country’s prime minister to stop lying about abortion.
“It is unbecoming for the Prime Minister of Canada today to deliberately utter a falsehood and to keep repeating it,” Campaign Life Coalition president Jim Hughes wrote in a letter to Justin Trudeau.
“Abortion is not a ‘Charter right,’ and it is not a ‘human right.’”
Campaign Life, which is Canada’s largest pro-life group, published Hughes’ September 29 letter on its website last Friday.
The letter is an “opportunity to perhaps inform” Trudeau what happened when his father, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, brought in the Charter in 1982, when Justin was 10 years old, Hughes told LifeSiteNews.
“I just reached a point where I was so tired of listening to him implying there was a Charter right to abortion that I went back through my files and found all the materials from when we battled his father on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and demanded that the unborn be included,” Hughes said.
The Campaign Life president also sent a copy of his letter to all Member of Parliament in an attempt to get across “to everybody, especially the MPs, because they talk about Charter rights” that “there is no Charter right to kill children before birth.”
Trudeau has long insisted there is, most notably when defending his 2014 edict as Liberal leader banning pro-life advocates from running as party candidates.
“The Liberal party is the party of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It defines us in the way it defines this country,” he told the Ottawa Citizen at the time.
“And since 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada has recognized that a woman’s right to a choice in this matter is a Charter right. (It) is upheld by the Constitution.”
But as Hughes explains in his letter, when Campaign Life lobbied hard for a right-to-life amendment to the Charter, Pierre Elliott Trudeau “assured us that the Charter would have no impact on the abortion question.”
The Catholic bishops also asked for a right-to-life amendment, but Trudeau told them it wasn’t necessary.
“The arguments advanced to show that the Charter will create an entitlement to abortion on demand have been clearly refuted in the opinion given by the Department of Justice,” Trudeau wrote Edmonton’s Archbishop Joseph MacNeil, then head of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, on July 6, 1981.
“In my view, the need of an amendment has not been clearly demonstrated,” added Trudeau.
In June 1981, Trudeau stated: “Because the public is evenly divided on the subject of abortion, it was the government’s ‘considered view’ that a position favouring one side should not be enshrined in the charter.”
The government “feels the issue is not one which should be defended by the Constitution,” added Trudeau senior.
“Over the years, your father’s words have proven to be true,” Hughes wrote the current prime minister.
Abortion “has never been declared to be a ‘Charter right’ by the Supreme Court of Canada,” he added. “In fact, the Court has specifically held that there is a legitimate right for Parliament to legislate on the issue, should it so choose.”
Trudeau fils also insists abortion is a “human right.”
Trudeau’s Liberals promote abortion as a human right at the UN, and have earmarked $650 million to provide and promote abortion in developing countries, including funding campaigns to overturn laws restricting abortion.
More recently, he told Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar in August that “reproductive rights for women are integral to women’s rights in general and women’s rights are human rights.”
But Hughes’ letter refutes this claim as well.
“For as long as the United Nations has existed, consensus has never been reached on the issue of abortion as a human right,” he wrote.
“Where abortion is alluded to in agreed conclusions (non-binding normative documents which are adopted at various UN commissions), it is cast in a negative light.”
The “majority of the 193 member states that make up the United Nations do not share your personal view that abortion is a human right,” added Hughes.
He concluded his letter by asking Trudeau to stop telling untruths.
“In the future, we respectfully request that you refrain from either stating or implying that abortion is a ‘Charter right,’ a ‘human right’ and is synonymous with ‘women’s rights’ as it is clearly not.”
Hughes says he hasn’t yet heard back from Trudeau.
LifeSiteNews contacted the prime minister’s office for comment but did not hear back by deadline.
To read the full text of Jim Hughes’ letter, go here.