Catholics with room on their prayer lists might do well to add Alissa Golob’s name. 

The unbelievably brave young Alberta mom will need all the spiritual help she can get to withstand the pro-abortion ideological furies now besetting her.

As Register correspondent Anna Farrow reported in our last issue, and as the National Post courageously recounted in a full front-page story on Nov. 22, Golob has pretty much single-handedly demolished the mythology around late-term abortion in Canada.

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She did so by going undercover to abortion clinics in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and elsewhere to record the routine way in which administrative and health care staff offered her options for pregnancy termination deep into the third trimester.

Knowing that Golob herself was 20 weeks pregnant when she first undertook this nerve-wracking investigative effort amplifies the eeriness of the abortion providers’ nonchalance. She acknowledged the emotional strain in interviews with the Register, the Post and, to its eternal credit, CBC Radio. 

Wherever we are on the pro-life/pro-choice spectrum, we can all put ourselves in the position of an expectant mother, acutely aware of the babe in her womb, listening to an abortionist’s clinical voice describe what could happen next. Imagine sitting across a desk while someone ticks off the boxes of administering a chemical to an unborn heart to produce a still birth.

 “I would become emotional, and that wasn't acting,” Golob told Anna Farrow. “I was asking about fetal development, and the doctor was telling me the fetus comes out in pieces. The next day, at my anatomy scan, the ultrasound tech was telling me specific details and that I was expecting a boy. I was already feeling kicks at that point.”

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No wonder Golob waited two years until her own child was born and robustly growing up before releasing the videos Nov. 19 on the website of RightNow, the pro-life organization she co-founded.

The outpouring of support on social media was heart-warming. The equal and opposite vitriolic reaction was beyond chilling. It was an ice-bath refresher, as if we needed such, of how diabolically ideological obsession can deform certain human minds and spirits. 

One example stands for the rest. A heroically anonymous poster child for ad hominem venom attacked Golob for “playing politics” with her unborn baby and called on her to be arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism against women.” Forget the new-found thought crime of so-called denialism. We’re now at a point in Canadian life where some of us, at least, want to legislatively transform the simple act of recording the truth into a form of terrorist activity.

In some ways worse, however, was the outpouring of furrowed brow murmuring from health care providers who insisted Golob’s undercover interviews misrepresented the reality of late-term abortion in Canada. The videos plainly show staff touting the ease of access to late fetal terminations, with the clinic in Vancouver offering publicly-funded travel to Seattle or Colorado if the procedure was unavailable locally for logistical reasons. Still, otherwise decent, intelligent medical practitioners insisted it remains “extremely rare” in Canada. These are people whose professional lives are evidence-based but in the face of ideologically inconvenient evidence, they insisted it was the indisputable evidence that was the problem.

The deeply troubling disjuncture there underlines the paradoxical incoherence of the whole pro-choice/pro-abortion position, which is brought into stark relief by the very existence of late-term abortion. 

If there is nothing wrong with abortion, if it’s fundamentally “only a matter of choice” as the mantra has been for three generations now, then why be concerned about the stage of pregnancy at which it occurs? Why rush to the public square to vehemently proclaim late-term abortion is non-existent, or at worst extremely rare, if the cutting of babies into pieces or chemically stopping their hearts before birth is just a variant of routine, normalized medical procedure? Shouldn’t the defenders of “choice” defend it across the continuum of what is chosen, indeed shout huzzahs to its ubiquity?

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But they don’t. It took a courageous young woman, 20 weeks pregnant, to enter their legally-protected sanctums and have them spill the beans on what goes on with their speculums. After decades of obfuscation around abortion, a young mom’s exposé might turn out to be a vital turning point in overcoming the culture of and revitalizing the culture of life.

That young woman, Alissa Golob, deserves our prayers of thanks for her courage and her pluck. A word with St. Michael for her spiritual protection would be prudent as well.