Calgary hospital silences critics (Canada).

A Calgary court has ordered Alberta Report magazine to stop publishing stories about late-term eugenic abortions taking place at Calgary's Foothills Hospital.

And following the outcry produced by the stories, Calgary police are investigating claims that babies born alive in that hospital are denied care, and the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons has lauched a probe into the reports of late-term abortions done in both Calgary and Edmonton (National Post, May 7,1999).

The Calgary Regional Health Authority (CRHA) obtained an injunction April 30 after Edmonton-based Alberta Report ran a story April 12 based on accounts by unidentified nurses and leaked hospital memos. The injunction exempted the April 12 story and a May 3rd cover story which had already been published.

Publisher of Alberta Report Link Byfield suspects that hospital authorities are desperate to discover the magazine's sources among Foothill's approximately 140 nurses. The nurses' accounts have exposed what may be criminal activity at the hospital. Late-term abortions (after 24 weeks) done for suspected lethal anomalies diagnosed in utero involve inducing labour. But infants not infrequently survive labour, and are then left to die (AR, April 12, May 3).

On May 5, Reform MP for Calgary Southeast Jason Kenney requested an investigation into the possibility of "eugenic infanticide" at Foothills. Criminal Code Section 223 states that a child is a human being if it proceeds in a living state from its mother. Actions, including deliberate neglect, which lead to the death of an infant after birth are subject to criminal sanctions under Sections 222 through to 242 of the Code.

While the Ontario media, with the exception of the National Post, have been mute about the story, it has received tremendous coverage in Alberta, and media scrutiny has turned to other hospitals in the province. A May 4 article in the Edmonton Journal revealed that late-term genetic abortions are also done at that city's Royal Alexandra Hospital. It screens its nurses so that those who have objections are not compelled to participate in these "procedures." At Calgary's Foothills, however, a hospital decision in March placed mothers seeking late-term eugenic abortions in the same ward as mothers giving birth, and nurses are forced to participate fin genetic terminations (AR, April 12).

If the CRHA proceeds to press for a permanent injunction, the case should be before the courts in about five weeks. "I'm prepared to press hard," Byfield told Catholic Insight. Aside from the need to investigate grisly activities behind hospital walls, there's the issue of freedom of the press.

The CRHA obtained the order ostensibly because it feared for the safety of hospital abortionists and patients, none of whom were identified in the magazine's articles. The claim was, Byfield observed, based on what might happen, and if one can't print stories because of what might happen, "then we've ceased to be a liberal democracy."

The story has also planted doubt in the minds of many reporters about the matter of "reproductive health," Byfield noted in a May 7 column in the National Post. He wrote:

"We were told in the 1970s that the foetus is a 'lump of cells.' Only fanatics preserve that pretense now. Then we were assured termination is almost always a desperate medical necessity. Nobody believes that any more except politicians. Then we were told Canada doesn't do late-term abortions. Now we find out doctors do them routinely to eliminate handicapped people from our society, and have secretly expanded into selective infanticide. And of course, this is justified because (wait for it) these 'fatally deformed' infants were all, without exception, going to die anyway. Trust us on this, say the doctors, the 'professionals.'"