DUR: Surely it cannot be that babies born alive after an abortion, are left to die?

Richard Dur is Executive Director of Prolife Alberta, an organization dedicated to advancing pro-life public policy in AlbertaSomething is happening here in Alberta that most people would never believe could be true. But it is.According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) — the federal agency responsible for compiling and reporting standardized health data across Canada — Alberta reported a total of 133 late-term abortions in the 2023-2024 year. The numbers are shocking — and they should be.But they are real, documented, and officially reported by the government’s own data agency. Of those 133 late-term abortions, 28 babies were born alive after the procedure. Yes, born alive..Picture one. A tiny baby, only just a bit bigger than your hand, lies on a cold metal tray. Her skin is paper-thin, her little chest flutters as she fights to pull in each breath. Her mouth opens, closes, opens again — not crying, just gasping. Her fists clench and uncurl, tiny fingers searching, aching, for the comfort they instinctively expect.In another place, under different circumstances, she would be cradled against her mother’s breast, skin to skin. She would hear her mother’s heartbeat — the familiar rhythm she’s known since her earliest moments in the womb, the sound she recognizes as safety, as home. She would know her mother’s scent, her warmth, the rise and fall of her mother’s breath. She would feel the touch she’s wired to need, the soft voice, trembling and fierce with love, whispering, “Shh, my baby. It’s okay. Mama’s here. Come here, baby. I’ve got you.”But here, in this cold room, there is no mother’s touch.No blanket.No scent of home.No heartbeat.No whispered promise of love, only the quiet hush of people looking away.Because under current Alberta medical practice, no help is given.She wasn’t supposed to survive. .So she is left there — small, alive, alone — until, by the quiet design of grown-ups who have turned away, she stops breathing on her own.How can this happen?A major 2024 Quebec study covering more than 13,000 second-trimester abortions (15 to 29 weeks) gives some insight. Of these, 48 percent were due to severe fetal anomalies. Five percent were due to maternal emergencies — cases where the mother’s life was at risk. But nearly half, 47 percent, were done for “other reasons:” personal, social, or simply unspecified. Though these figures come from Quebec (no comparable study exists for Alberta,) there’s no reason to assume the pattern would be dramatically different here. More than one in ten of those Quebec abortions resulted in a live birth. Last year in Alberta it was one in five. .This is not rare. This is not a fluke. This is a known, repeated outcome — and it’s happening here, in Alberta.As William Wilberforce once said: “You may choose to look the other way, but you can never again say that you did not know.”Even desperately wanted babies, born as micro-preemies — babies delivered before 23 weeks — face a similar medical abandonment. Alberta applies a cutoff: no active care, under formal Alberta Health Services policy. Babies who survive abortion face a parallel neglect — not because of a written rule, but because current clinical practice does not require intervention. Yet some of these babies could survive with care. In Ontario, doctors and parents decide. Globally, advances in medicine keep pushing back what’s dryly called the “age of viability” — some babies now survive when born at 21 or 22 weeks and go on to live a normal life. But not in Alberta..And behind all this stands a grim national reality: Canada is the only democratic country on earth with no laws regulating abortion at any stage, for any reason. There are no gestational limits. No reporting requirements. No protections. Not even North Korea can say that. Even liberal European countries — places like France, Germany, and Sweden — impose gestational limits on abortion and provide legal protections for infants born alive.This legal vacuum has left enormous gaps — and nowhere is that more visible, or more disturbing then when a child survives a late-term abortion and is left fighting for life.Canada’s abortion-on-demand regime was never chosen. It wasn’t debated. It wasn’t voted on. It’s the consequence of federal judges striking down abortion laws — and politicians refusing to replace them. But this issue isn’t about regulating abortion itself; it addresses what happens after an abortion, in those rare but real moments when a child is born alive..And here’s the thing: this isn’t about federal powers or jurisdiction either.Alberta doesn’t need federal permission to fix this. The power — and the responsibility — are already in its hands.This is where Alberta can show the country what real leadership looks like — by taking these concrete steps right now:End the archaic Alberta Health Services policy that denies active care to babies born before 23 weeks. As medical technology advances, doctors should not be bound by an outdated, increasingly arbitrary cutoff. Let doctors and parents decide — as they do in Ontario.Mandate equal care for born-alive infants. Require doctors to provide the same medical care to babies who survive an abortion as they would to any other newborn of the same gestational age. A baby’s right to care should never depend on the circumstances of her birth.If Alberta wants to show it’s serious about more Alberta, less Ottawa, it could start right here — by doing what Ottawa refuses to do: protecting its most vulnerable children. Because the choice is simple: we either look the other way, or we act. Richard Dur is an award-winning political consultant with extensive experience working on campaigns across Canada. In addition to his professional work, he serves as the volunteer Executive Director of Prolife Alberta, an organization dedicated to advancing pro-life public policy in Alberta.

DUR: Surely it cannot be that babies born alive after an abortion, are left to die?

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