Undercover in Canada’s Lawless Abortion Industry

On November 27, 2023, thirty-six-year-old Alissa Golob walked through the doors of the Cabbagetown Women’s Clinic in Toronto, Canada. She had two young children at home, $2,137 in her purse, and was carrying a twenty-two-week baby. The abortion clinic staff assured her that she could abort the child she was carrying up to twenty-four weeks; Women’s College Hospital nearby would go up to thirty-two weeks. She would have to pay cash. “Canada doesn’t have a limit, okay?” the abortionist told her. 

Golob recorded the entire exchange. Over the next three months, the Catholic mom would also go undercover inside abortion clinics in Montreal, Vancouver, and Calgary, inspired by the undercover investigations of Lila Rose of Live Action and David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress. Golob’s investigation—the first ever pro-life undercover exposé of Canadian clinics—was released last month and forced ugly questions onto the front pages.

Golob, cofounder of the political pro-life group RightNow, was told in clinic after clinic that her baby could be aborted by lethal injection; that it would be “like a delivery, but with a dead fetus”; that an induction abortion would result in a “mini-stillbirth.” Despite both Golob and her unborn baby being healthy, she was always assured that she could still have an abortion. (Last year, a baby in Iowa survived after being born premature at twenty-one weeks.)

“Going undercover was personally very difficult,” Golob told me. “My initial urge was to talk to every girl in the waiting room and tell them that they didn’t need to get an abortion, that I could help them. It was also so hard to be pregnant with my beautiful baby boy and to hear the abortionists and clinic nurses talk about him as if he were so disposable and even try to convince me to have a late-term abortion because it was better for my ‘actual’ children, and even society.”

Canada has had no limits on abortion since 1988, when the Supreme Court overturned existing abortion laws in R. v. Morgentaler. Parliament attempted to pass new abortion legislation only once: Bill C-43 passed the House of Commons in 1990 and would have recriminalized abortion with a series of expansive exceptions. But it failed on a tie vote in the Senate in 1991, and since then, Canada’s abortion activists and progressive politicians have fiercely defended this lawless status quo—in part by denying its existence.

For years, abortion activists and politicians have pushed the falsehood that late-term abortions are only perpetrated in Canada in cases of severe health risks. In 2013, former Liberal Member of Parliament Dr. Carolyn Bennett insisted that “The assertion that late-term abortions can be performed ‘for any reason, or no reason at all’ is just not true.” When the National Post put the undercover investigation on their front page, Liberal MP Dr. Doug Eyolfson responded by falsely claiming on X that “‘Late term abortion’ is a false flag. The only abortions are performed late in a pregnancy are in emergency situations (like septic pregnancy) where the fetus is not viable and the mother and fetus would die if the procedure was not performed. The NP article is misinformation.”

If Dr. Eyolfson had read a few paragraphs into the article, he would have found Abortion Care Canada affirming Golob’s fundamental finding, namely that there “does not have to be a specific medical concern that is named” in order to procure a late-term abortion. 

In fact, the entire report quotes activist after activist condemning Golob’s investigation and accusing her of deception—before reluctantly admitting that her conclusions were correct. In a second front-page story, columnist Chris Selley observed: “If I didn’t know better, I would almost think those advocates aren’t entirely comfortable with the practice they’re defending.”

Abortion activists and their political allies are aware of how unpopular late-term abortion is with the public; a 2020 poll conducted for National Post found seven in ten Canadians “say abortion should be generally illegal in the last three months of pregnancy, from 28 weeks on.” Thus, activists work hard to keep the truth about Canada’s abortion regime from the public. In 2018, for example, the We Need A Law campaign put up billboards across Canada containing the simple, factual statement: “Canada Has No Abortion Laws.”

Abortion activists successfully complained to the advertising regulatory body, Ad Standards, to get the billboards unapproved. They admitted that the billboards were “literally true,” but objected to the “general impression” Canadians might get. Activists do not want Canadians to realize what our no-holds-barred abortion regime means, which is precisely why Golob’s undercover investigation has reduced them to contradictory sputtering. They want Canada to remain lawless but realize that their position is difficult to defend without sounding ghoulish.

Every year in Canada babies are born alive after failed abortions and left to die; in 2013, a grim headline in the National Post summed up the Canadian reality: “Birth of a legal quandary: Live-birth abortions a perilous grey zone in Canada’s criminal code.” A 2024 study in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology found that in Quebec, induced second-trimester abortions resulted in a live birth 11.2 percent of the time, with one in ten of these “live-born fetuses” surviving “more than 3 hours.” Not a single major political leader has addressed this ongoing policy of de facto infanticide in Canada.

The response to Golob’s investigation has proven that some Canadians, at least, still possess the capacity to be shocked when confronted with this reality. “The entire feeling was incredibly stressful, sad, and difficult,” Golob said of her journey inside the clinics. “My only hope is that going into such dark places shines a bright light into the abortion industry and what they tell women; the tactics they use; and above all, how late they are willing to perform or refer for an abortion for no medical reason.”

Image by Nadzeya Haroshka via iStock. Image cropped.