Canadian Taxpayers Fund Abortions, They Cost $100 Million Each Year
Abortions are fully funded by the government in Canada, and cost taxpayers $100 million a year.
Around 100,000 fetuses are extracted on the taxpayer dime, at a rough average cost of about $1000 each.
This may not sound like a lot, but given the fact that Canada is around one tenth as large as the United States, proportionally this would be around $1 billion CAD, or $750 million USD, per year. Thankfully, the US not only does not fund abortions to the same extent as Canada, but they also have less abortions per capita.
Every abortion in Canada is required, by law, to be funded by healthcare.
Why?
The Canada Health Act requires full funding for “medically necessary services”. Abortion, elective or not, falls into this “medical necessary services” category.
This means that the 98,102 abortions that are not due to medical reasons are fully covered by Canadian taxpayers.
This includes a large proportion of the roughly 3,000 “late-term” abortions.
How Much Do Abortions Cost in Canada?
This question is surprisingly hard to answer, given the expectation that taxpayer dollars are spent transparently.
The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada estimates that early abortions (the least expensive) cost $1500 in hospitals and $700 in private clinics. The differences in the prices are due to different anesthetics used, depending on the venue.
In 2015, there were 31,911 abortions performed in hospitals and 68,193 in private clinics. If you do the math this gives us a total of $95.6 million in abortion costs in 2015.
So, Canada spends roughly $100 million on abortion per year.
And this is a low estimate. The price estimate used was for the cheapest abortions there are. Given that later term abortions can cost up to $2,000 USD (or ~$2,700 CAD) this means that the number could be much higher.
This also doesn’t take into account the cost on the healthcare systems to take abortions in addition to all the other procedures they perform.
Also, abortions have a lot of surrounding issues that increase the burden on the healthcare system, such as associated depression, complications surrounding abortions, etc.
Additionally, the lost social capital and political costs cannot be ignored, though they may be difficult to quantify.
Lastly, as suggested by the Campaign Life Coalition, the lost tax revenue from having less people in the economy results in a staggering amount.
What Do Canadians Think About Taxpayer Funded Abortions?
So what do Canadians think? Do they agree that the government should be paying for abortions, even purely elective ones?
Turns out, no.
Only 43% of Canadians want abortions funded outside of medical emergencies, which account for 2% of all abortions.
An Ontario poll showed that 91% of the public doesn’t even know that abortions are government funded. When they learned that the government did fund abortions, 61% opposed it.
Canadians don’t want to pay for abortions, yet they do; to the tune of $100 million a year.
