When I was much younger than I am now, bringing up young children, I made the mistake of attending a parenting class. Although I was not a Christian at the time, I still had managed to acquire strong opinions on many things. Abortion was one. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that to abort a foetus was to kill an innocent baby in the early stages of its life. I knew with considerable certainty that it was murder; I didn’t need God to tell me that (although, in retrospect, I presume the certainly did come from him), I just knew.

When the teacher of the course decided she would like to probe the “values” of her students, one of the exercises she asked us to do was to place ourselves on one side of the room if we agreed with abortion and the other if we did not. Of the 30 or so people in the room, my wife and I were the only two people on the anti-abortion side. I was a little startled since I was in a room full of people who supposedly wanted to care for their children, not get rid of them before they arrived. Welcome to Canada, I thought – I was a fairly recent immigrant.

Maybe I imagined it, but the instructor seemed a little chilly towards my wife and I after that.

I’ve grown used to both the Canadian enthusiasm for killing unborn babies and the chill emanating from such enthusiasts when I voice my disagreement.

Even so, surely a church which claims to champion the underdog, to stand for justice, to defend the most vulnerable members of our society, to preach love, love, love would want to defend the unborn. Alas not. The Anglican Church of Canada is dismally silent about the yearly murder 100,000 unborn babies in Canada. It has nothing recent to say about this unregulated industrial (yes, it is an industry) death machine.

And it gets worse. Michael Coren, now Rev Michael Coren, a newly minted ACoC cleric, having shed the last vestiges of common sense that still desperately clung to him, has penned this article lamenting the possible overturn of Roe v. Wade in the US, an outcome which, he says, would be “disastrous”.

God have mercy on us and him:

Taking achievements for granted is one of the greatest errors in the political handbook. Always be on guard, be ever vigilant. Yet activists and elected representatives are constant culprits in this regard, and that partly explains how in the U.S. there is a genuine possibility that abortion rights, women’s reproductive autonomy, could soon be harshly restricted or even curtailed.

The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments about abortion around the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. This particular conflict concerns a Mississippi law that bans abortion at 15 weeks. Under the iconic Roe v. Wade and the subsequent Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey cases, this law is unconstitutional. But while we won’t know the Dobbs decision for several months, it seems highly likely that the conservative-dominated court is willing to make a ruling that will reverse Roe.

That would have been impossible until recently, but now six of the nine Supreme Court justices are conservative, three of them appointed by Donald Trump. They’ve already heard a Texas case that bans abortion after six weeks, and they allowed it to stand for three months. If the court does reverse Roe, it would be historic. And disastrous. For half-a-century Roe has guided the U.S. on abortion rights and if that changes, the entire template of the discussion will be transformed. It will unleash and empower the anti-abortion movement, which is large, militant, and extremely well-funded.