MP shares personal abortion story

Statement made as two Tories attend March for Life rally

- TONDA MACCHARLES

After a Tory MP introduced a petition this week calling for national regulation of abortion, Tourism Minister Soraya Martinez Ferrada spoke Thursday about her experience as a pregnant 18-year-old “without rights” in Chile, where women and doctors who performed abortions could be imprisoned.

OTTAWA Federal cabinet minister Soraya Martinez Ferrada was determined to put a human face — hers — on a political story that was fiercely argued in the abstract this week, inside and outside Parliament.

The tourism minister stood in the House of Commons during question period and told MPs she had an abortion at age 18, after she discovered she was pregnant shortly after arriving back in Chile — a country her parents had fled years earlier as political refugees of the Pinochet regime.

As a teenager, Ferrada found herself “without rights, without choice” in a country where women and doctors who performed abortions could be imprisoned at the time. Ferrada gave up on her dream of making a life in Chile, and returned immediately to Canada, she told the Star.

“For the second time, Canada saved me by allowing me to have a legal and safe abortion for a future that I had chosen,” Ferrada said in the Commons. “Why are the Conservatives attacking the freedom for women to choose?”

Outside, thousands of anti-abortion activists were rallying on Parliament Hill in the annual March for Life demonstration to press for new laws and gather signatures on petitions to “legally restrict abortion.”