Two years ago, a visibly pregnant pro-life activist undertook an undercover operation in abortion clinics in several Canadian cities. Her mission was to gather evidence on whether or not late-term abortions are routinely procured by Canadian women regardless of medical justification.

Alissa Golob, co-founder of the pro-life organization RightNow, was 22 weeks (five months) pregnant when she booked an appointment at Cabbagetown Women’s Clinic in Toronto. She secretly recorded her conversations with both the counselor and a doctor. The video was released on YouTube on Nov. 12. 

In an interview with The Catholic Register prior to the videos’ release, Golob said the experience proved for her falsity of the prevailing narrative that late-term abortions are rare and afforded only to women with medically compromised pregnancies affecting either mother or baby.

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“From my work in the pro-life movement, and from dealing with women who have changed their mind about abortion, I knew that wasn't true, but I wanted to prove it.” 

Though engaged in pro-life activism since a teenager, Golob was shocked by what was said in the clinic conversations.

In Toronto, Golob was told by a counsellor that though the clinic could not provide her with an abortion after 24 weeks, the nearby Women’s College Hospital could. 

“Sometimes people come here, they're not so sure, they need more time…and they end up deciding, ‘Yes, I do want,’ but we can't do anymore,” the staff member says in the video. “I send them to Women's College Hospital. It's a hospital that's close by…they don't have a limit.”

A doctor explained that the abortions performed at the hospital would be a different procedure than at the clinic. It was, she said, like a “mini stillbirth.”

When Golob asked if she would need to provide the hospital with a medical reason for her request, she was told, “that kind of abortion care hasn't been in Canada since the 1960s.”

The doctor explained there are proven emotional and socio-economic benefits to limiting family size.

“Understand that a lot of women do this because they already have two kids and they can't take care of another one,” she said. “Studies have shown that their actual children thrive better if they (the mothers) feel that way.”

“There's also a lot of benefits to society in general. So, families tend to be able to have a higher socio-economic status. Patients can complete their plans, which generally involves education, employment, and things like that. So, the reasons to do it are valid reasons and everybody will reflect that, right?”

In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Morgentaler ruled that the abortion provision in the Criminal Code was unconstitutional. No law has been subsequently legislated to regulate the provision of abortion. 

A late-term abortion is defined as one performed after 20 weeks. It has become part of the Canadian media and political canon that late-term abortions are exceptional and always medically necessary.

In a 2017 position paper, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC) wrote that, “most of the small number of abortions performed over 20 weeks’ gestation in Canada are done to protect the patient’s physical health, or because of serious fetal abnormalities.”

Four years earlier, in response to a National Post opinion article, Toronto MP Carolyn Bennett wrote an irate letter to the editor insisting that, “no physician in Canada can terminate a pregnancy over 24 weeks without serious indications that the life of the mother is at risk or that the fetus has very serious malformations.” 

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“I challenge (columnist Jonathan) Kay to find one late-term abortion performed in Canada to a healthy mother with a healthy fetus,” Bennett wrote.

Fast forward 12 years and the social media chatter about RightNow’s Toronto video has been a repetition of the mantra that late-term abortions in Canada are always performed out of medical necessity.

In a Nov. 13 post on X, Golob wrote: “Canadian hospitals are committing third-trimester abortions for no medical reason whatsoever.” A professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Calgary  responded: “I am a Canadian ObGyn who has been doing this work for over 2 decades in 4 provinces. That's quite the claim you are making. Not true.”

It is unclear from her post whether the professor had viewed the RightNow video.

The Register asked Golob what it was like to be having those conversations as she was carrying her little boy, now 20 months old.

“Sometimes in these sessions, I would become emotional, and that wasn't acting,” she said.

Coincidentally, the day after her undercover appointment at one clinic, Golob had her own appointment for her routine 20-week ultrasound.

“One day I was in the abortion clinic where I was asking about fetal development, and the abortion doctor was telling me that the fetus comes out in pieces. The very next day, I was at my anatomy scan where the ultrasound tech was telling me very specific details about the internal organs and that I was expecting a boy this time around,” she told the Register.

“I was already feeling kicks at that point. The dichotomy between the two appointments was stark.”

The most shocking part of the experience for Golob, and for those within the pro-life community who have viewed the videos, is the casualness with which doctors and counselors discuss late-term abortion.

“It is shocking about how cavalierly they talk about it, how it's just another procedure,” said Golob.

“They would say, ‘Oh, we might have to remove your uterus. It's rare, but it could happen. Oh, you can expel (the) fetus in the car or something, so we want you close by.’ That’s the way that they talked about the most serious things that could happen to me. The procedure on the baby itself is quite shocking, but it's just like they're talking getting a root canal or a tooth pulled. When this is a fully viable, developed baby, you could give birth to at the same hospital where they're doing these late-term induction abortions.”

Golob hopes her undercover videos might spark the same public interest as that generated by a 2012 CBC investigation on private ultrasound clinics and their connection to the practice of sex-selective abortions.

The RightNow video was released a week following the media furor over the ostrich cull in B.C., and Golob wonders whether Canadians will be as exercised about late-term abortions as they were about dead ostriches.

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“We have outrage over ostriches. Are we going to have outrage over viable babies?,” asked Golob.

Two days after the video was uploaded, it had received six thousand views.