After 10 months of trying to get answers from Health Canada as to why the Canadian Health Network (CHN) website fails to give any information about abortion from a pro-life perspective, why CHN provides abortion related information almost exclusively from abortion-rights groups, and what the CHN management team plans to do with the numerous suggestions I gave back in September, 2003, for how the coverage of abortion could be improved...after an arduous 10-month process of frustration, I have a bit of good news to report:

CHN Executive Director Catherine Drew told me in a July 16 email that one of the brochures which I strongly objected to was in the process of being “unpublished” from CHN’s website. I checked the website, and indeed it has been removed!

It is the offensive, inaccurate, and out-of-date brochure called “Prenatal Development,” published by Childbirth By Choice Trust which I referred to when I first wrote about CHN’s pro-abortion bias in a Special Report in the Sept/Oct’03 issue of LifeCanada News – a brochure which compares the developing human child to a guinea pig and a monkey.

As I mentioned in the special report, the CHN website is a government-sponsored, health-related website whose motto “Health Information You can Trust” belied the website’s content. CHN seriously downplays the health risks associated with abortion and only presents information from a pro-abortion-rights perspective. And is it any wonder, given that Planned Parenthood Federation of Canada (PPFC) was the Affiliate for the Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) topic of the CHN website? (Affiliates are responsible for selecting content for their topic areas.)

At that time, I was in contact with CHN media spokesperson Emmanuel Chabot. He set up a telephone interview for me on November 28 with CHN Executive Director Catherine Drew and CHN Manager Valerie Jerabek. I had a number of questions to ask, but all I could find out from Ms. Drew and Ms. Jerabek was that the CHN content was in the process of being reviewed and everything was in a state of flux. They would not acknowledge that an entire perspective on abortion was being censored. I was given less than 15 minutes, then the interview was terminated.

Mr. Chabot agreed to take my unanswered questions in written form and give them to the CHN management team to respond to me in writing. I sent those questions via email that same day.

It was around this time LifeCanada learned that CHN was in the process of selecting Affiliates for the upcoming term. Was it possible that PPFC’s days as SRH Affiliate were numbered?