Why the Liberal-NDP Free Contraception Plan Is Anti-Canada and Anti-Woman

Parents and children enjoy Family Day as they skate on a home-made ice rink in a city park in Toronto on Feb. 15, 2021. The Canadian Press/Frank Gunn

Commentary

As Canada’s fertility rate continues to plummet to extinction levels, making demographers sound the alarm, the Liberals and the NDP in a tone-deaf move have reached a deal to table pharmacare legislation to cover the cost of hormonal and medical interventions that prevent women from having children.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh urged the Liberals in mid-February to cover contraceptives for all Canadians as part of a “pharmacare proposal,” warning that if the Liberals missed his March 1 deadline to table pharmacare legislation that includes free contraception, then the Liberals would “no longer [be able to] count on any of our [NDP] votes” to prop up the Liberal minority government, which would trigger an early election.

“Clearly, making contraception free across the country will save a lot of money for women,” Singh said at a Feb. 16 press conference in Coquitlam, B.C., in defence of the plan. “It will make their lives easier, and it will cut down on costs in our healthcare system,” he continued, adding: “Right now, the NDP is fighting to make this happen across the country.”

Of course, there is no such thing as “free” contraception. It will be funded by taxpayers—your money. Behind the NDP push for free contraception is the false notion of “reproductive health and rights.” In today’s Orwellian doublespeak of the West, the phrase “reproductive health and rights” has come to mean 1) the “right” of a woman to suppress her fertility and poison her body so as to make it hostile to producing offspring, and 2) the “right” for her to exterminate a newly conceived life if it manages to come into existence despite her efforts to prevent it from happening.

In a sane world, “reproductive health and rights” should have to do with the right to reproduce, that is, the right to produce offspring, to procreate, to have children in as healthy a way as possible. How has this phrase come to mean the “right” to block the creation of new life and the “right” to kill this new life if he or she is “unwanted”?

This phrase has become a euphemism for a culture linked to sexual hedonism, the utilitarian use of persons, and the extermination of the smallest members of the human family when their arrival is inconvenient.

The NDP’s push for free contraception could not have come at a worse time.

As I showed in a previous piece on these pages titled “Can Canada Be Saved From Extinction?,” the greatest crisis facing the West, including Canada, is population collapse leading to extinction and annihilation. But it was not always this way. In the 1950s, Canadian women bore an average of four children. The fertility rate has steadily declined since then to today’s dismal rate of 1.3, a staggering decrease of 64 percent, well below the 2.1 children per woman needed for the population to replace itself in order to maintain the health of current social structures.

If Canada does not alter course, it can be expected that the population will be halved in 60 years and halved again by 2137. Immigration is acting as a temporary, bandage solution, but the places where immigrants are coming from are also facing their own population collapses.

Jagmeet Singh is simply mistaken in claiming that providing free contraception will cut down on costs in our health-care system. The first and most obvious reason he is wrong is that preventing the conception of Canadian children prevents the country’s future tax base from coming into existence, the base upon which the health-care system entirely depends. Without sufficient taxpayers, the health-care system collapses. Canada desperately needs more children to secure its future as “the true north strong and free,” as our national anthem states. Canada has much good in it and should not be permitted to contracept itself out of existence.

Furthermore, Singh is wrong because contraception is harmful, putting a woman at war with her biology. Hormonal contraception, which contains synthetic versions of female hormones, is known to be carcinogenic, that is, cancer causing.

According to the U.S. government’s National Cancer Institute, studies have provided consistent evidence that the “risks of breast and cervical cancers are increased” in women who use contraceptives. The Canadian Cancer Society states that women who take the pill have a “higher risk” for breast, cervical, and liver cancers. Contraception has also been linked to an increased risk of developing blood clots and it is known to precipitate depression, and women using contraceptives have up to triple the risk of suicide when compared to women who don’t use it.

The cumulative cost of addressing these health issues in the health-care system would be difficult to capture because of its magnitude. SpaceX founder Elon Musk recently posted on X (formerly Twitter) about the “clear scientific consensus” when it comes to the negative effects of contraception on women’s health that, he said, “very few people seem to know.” He posted the following statistics, linking in his subsequent posts to relevant scientific literature on the topic: “Hormonal birth control makes you fat, doubles risk of depression & triples risk of suicide.”

While many women may not know what the literature says about the harms of contraception, more and more of them are getting off hormonal contraception after experiencing too many side effects. As 24-year-old Autumn Mackenzie explained in a February 2024 essay, doctors are “not being honest” about how hormonal contraception negatively affects women. Mackenzie used hormonal contraception for three years before she discovered what she calls “uncomfortable facts about the Pill’s effect on memory, trauma processing, and mate selection.”

“To put it bluntly,” she wrote after laying out what the medical literature states about contraception, “for decades, we have been conducting a medical experiment on young women and we are barely even measuring the results. And for what? It’s about time we took our bodies back.”

Instead of flooding Canadian women with hormonal pills that will only prevent more Canadians from coming into existence while harming women’s health, the government would do better to create incentives for parents to have more children. Pro-natal policies are working in Hungary to reverse the country’s fertility rate. In 2010, Hungary’s fertility rate was a dismal 1.25. That year, the Orbán government made it a priority to reverse this demographic collapse organically by introducing family-friendly policies that decreased and even eliminated the financial burdens of couples who want to have children. The policies included tax breaks for newlyweds and for each child that they had. Young couples were offered interest-free loans that would be cancelled once they had three children. The government also introduced housing subsidies for parents who had multiple children.

The impact of Orbán’s pro-family policies has been impressive. Since 2010, the number of marriages in Hungary almost doubled. Interestingly, the number of abortions was almost halved. The policies immediately bore fruit with the fertility rate substantially rising each year. It has now reached 1.6 and shows no sign of stopping.

With a fertility rate of 1.3 and dropping, Canada is heading toward demographic catastrophe. There is strong evidence that Canadian women want to have more children than they currently have. According to Canadian think tank Cardus, about half of women in Canada would have more children were it not for insufficient money, or focusing on a career, or having no suitable partner.

The time is now for bold and forward-thinking policies that invest in this country’s future by investing in families and in children. Hungary invests 5 percent of its GDP annually on family support, removing financial obstacles hindering young couples from starting a family. It’s time for Canada to follow in Hungary’s footsteps.

Children are a gift from God and our nation’s greatest treasure. Canadian families need to be encouraged to have more of them—before it’s too late.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.