When it comes to private clinic abortions, New Brunswick’s policy of not providing public funds makes a lot of sense.

Ujjal Dosanjh disagrees. The federal health minister claims the NB policy violates the Canada Health Act. But saying it doesn’t make it so. Bernard Lord and his government maintain that they are complying with the Act. So Dosanjh is taking the dispute to an arbitration panel. If things go his way there, and NB still refuses to give in, he could penalize the province financially.

Henry Morgentaler’s private abortion facility in Fredericton is at the center of the dispute. Morgentaler has himself sued the Province for denying him Medicare funding.

Dosanjh is all wet on this one.

The federal position on private clinics defies logic. They have three contradictory positions. Clinics for MRIs and other procedures in Alberta or BC? Dead against them. Clinics all over the place in Quebec (more than any province)? Silence. A private clinic for abortion on demand? All in favour! The minister’s bias in favour of abortion rights is showing.

The Canada Health Act is silent on abortion. It does stipulate access and public coverage of all medically necessary services. But nowhere does it give Ottawa the power to define abortion - or anything else - as such a service. With good reason: For the federal government to dictate that Medicare must pay for this or that would violate the unquestionable jurisdiction of provinces over health care.

Abortion is legal, doesn’t that mean it must be covered? It’s legal to get a nose job, no one expects Medicare to pick up the tab.

But women have a right to abortion, don’t they? Actually, the courts have not decided that. Canada has not had a Roe v. Wade (1973 US Supreme Court decision recognizing a constitutional right to abortion). It’s certainly not the role of the Minister of Health - or even a health dispute panel - to adjudicate such a right.

The one thing Mr. Dosanjh must hang his hat on is the idea that abortion is medically necessary. But since the Canada Health Act does not empower him to specify that, to win his case Dosanjh must rely on the same sleight-of-hand argument that his predecessors Ann McLellan and Alan Rock used. That is, New Brunswick has already defined abortion as a medically necessary service, therefore it must pay for abortions all of the time, everywhere - private clinics included. It’s as if he’s saying: you (NB) have created your own pickle, I’m just calling you on it.

The thing is NB’s position is no pickle at all. Just because a province treats abortion as medically necessary in some circumstances doesn’t mean it must treat every abortion so. Any school boy understands that just because you have one day off for a storm doesn’t mean every day’s a holiday.

Thus New Brunswick’s policy is not all inconsistent with the Canada Health Act. Abortions in hospitals are certified by two physicians as medically needed, they are covered. Abortions in a private clinic are not so certified, they are treated as elective procedures. As NB’s Health Minister Elvy Robichaud stated, “We don’t agree in providing free services for abortion on demand.”

The only logical rejoinder Mr. Dosanjh has is: “You can’t say some abortions are medically necessary, others electives! They’re all necessary.”

That represents pretty radical thinking: Every single unwanted pregnancy is a medical emergency that MUST be terminated! No medical society in this country holds such an extreme view. Ending an unwanted pregnancy may be a choice, but it’s not automatically a medical necessity. Only abortion rights ideologues think so.

Most people comprehend how abortion might be a medical emergency in cases like rape, incest or threat to the mother’s life. That’s why 72% of Canadians either don’t want Medicare to pay for abortions at all, or only except under such circumstances (2004 Environics poll). Most Canadians understand the distinction between medically necessary abortion and abortion on demand. Ujjal Dosanjh, however, does not.

Nor, for that matter, does NDP leader Elizabeth Weir. She has complained that most of the province’s hospitals don’t provide adequate abortion access.

All hospitals in the province - except one - are making a reasonable effort to distinguish between medically necessary abortions and abortion on demand. The Chalmers in Fredericton - the one hospital Ms. Weir lauds - is the exception. By performing abortion on demand (358 abortions in 2003-04 vs. 31 for other hospitals combined) yet billing Medicare for them under the guise of medically necessity, physicians there are, as our Association has previously alleged, defrauding the public. Mr. Robichaud should rein them in.

The province’s policy is not perfectly administered. But its core principle of not paying for abortion on demand makes good legal and medical, not to mention moral, sense. Critics like Ujjal Dosanjh are getting medicine and ideology mixed up.

Peter Ryan is Executive Director of the New Brunswick Right to Life Association.