Beyond Choice: The Brutality of Late-Term Abortion

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

―  Edmund Burke

Almost exactly two years ago, Canadian pro-life activist Alissa Golob walked into four different abortion facilities, in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. At the time, Golob was 22 weeks pregnant.

My little partner in crime.

He was a little over 21 weeks old when I went undercover in four abortion clinics across Canada, and listened to the abortionists and clinic workers talk to me, sometimes for hours and sometimes in great detail, about how to terminate his life as a… pic.twitter.com/mRE52kC6sT

— Alissa Golob (@alissagolob) November 22, 2025

Inspired by the work of Lila Rose, Golob was wielding an undercover camera to record her interactions with the facility staff. The filming took place two years ago, but Golob and her organization, RightNow, only released the footage in the past few weeks, helping spark debate on the topic of abortion, particularly the controversy of late-term abortion in Canada.

At each of the facilities, she told the staff that she was seeking an abortion. In each of them, she was assured that she could get an abortion, no matter what.

Not only could she get an abortion now, she was repeatedly told, but it would be possible to get an abortion even much further into her pregnancy, no questions asked.

Inside Canada’s Abortion Clinics

As Golob told the National Post, she was struck by “how nonchalantly and almost cavalierly they were talking about referring me” for a third-trimester abortion.

One abortionist told her that once she reached 35 or 36 weeks, she might struggle to find an abortionist willing to kill her baby. But “Twenty-four, up to 30 weeks? It’s very possible. The system certainly doesn’t think it’s too far.”

“Canada doesn’t have a limit, okay?” the abortionist at the Toronto facility told her. Another abortionist explained to her that Canada’s law doesn’t have a “too far.”

Each abortionist was 100% correct. Canada is among one of the very few nations on earth that has noabortion law. What this means is that, by default, abortion is perfectly legal up until birth…for any reason. This places Canada in such questionable company as communist China and North Korea.

And yet, while anyone motivated enough can easily confirm the reality of the legal situation, most Canadians remain woefully oblivious about how much of an extreme outlier their country theirs is.

Why Canada Is an Outlier on Late-Term Abortion Laws

When, very occasionally, the topic of abortion comes up, the almost uniformly pro-abortion media is effective at throwing sand in the eyes of their readers. They will dutifully quote pro-abortion propaganda claiming that while it is “technically” true that Canada has no abortion law, no late-term abortions actually occur in Canada.

As one pro-abortion member of parliament wrote in a letter to the National Post in 2013, “No physician in Canada can terminate a pregnancy over 24 weeks without serious indications that the life of the mother is at risk or that the fetus has very serious malformations.”

She added, “The assertion that late-term abortions can be performed ‘for any reason, or no reason at all’ is just not true.”

Canadian pro-life activists always knew that this was nonsense. There was no reason to believe that all Canadian abortionists would turn away women simply because they were “too far along” in pregnancy. Too many of them were clearly pro-abortion and viewed a woman’s desires as sacrosanct. There could be no limitations on them.

This is what inspired Golob to go undercover. If the media wouldn’t tell the truth, then she would have to showthe truth.

An Undercover Look Inside

What Golob found didn’t surprise her. But her findings did end up on the front page of the National Post, one of Canada’s national newspapers, and sparked a very rare conversation about abortion in the liberal country.

Golob says she found the experience traumatizing. “Going undercover was personally very difficult,” she told First Things. “My initial urge was to talk to every girl in the waiting room and tell them that they didn’t need to get an abortion, that I could help them.

“It was also so hard to be pregnant with my beautiful baby boy and to hear the abortionists and clinic nurses talk about him as if he were so disposable and even try to convince me to have a late-term abortion because it was better for my ‘actual’ children, and even society.”

Thanks to advances in neo-natal care, about 10-20% of babies born at 22 weeks – the age of Golob’s baby at the time of the videos – will survive. After 22 weeks, survival rates rise quickly. In other words, the abortionists Golob spoke to had no problem helping her end the life of a preborn child that could easily have survived.

And they were willing to do so, regardless of her reasons. As she was repeatedly told, she didn’t have to have a reason. Simply wanting it was enough.

While many ordinary Canadians were no doubt disturbed to discover that preborn children have no legal protections in the country, pro-abortion activists were unmoved.

How Canadians Are Misled About Late-Term Abortion

A rare (and disturbing) moment of candor came from a representative from Abortion Care Canada (ACC), who admitted that abortionists in Canada may indeed be performing abortions late into pregnancy.

“I think that one of the important things to remember is that abortion care is evolving all the time,” said ACC executive director TK Pritchard, “and slowly (there are) more people who can provide later care, and are being trained and able to offer that care, so this is a shifting and moving conversation.”

The Quebec government promptly responded to the video taken in the Montreal facility by expressing its unwavering support for abortion, no matter what. “Our position is clear: the government considers abortion to be a health issue and has no intention of introducing limits or conditions regarding access to it,” said Caroline Proulx, Quebec’s minister for seniors and status of women.

How Evil Is Rebranded as Good in Modern Society

It’s often said that the greatest trick the devil ever performed was convincing people that he didn’t exist.

All evil seeks to mimic this trick.

As St. Thomas Aquinas said, people do not choose evil directly. Rather they choose evil, “under the guise of the good.” Everywhere that evil appears, it does everything in its power to appear as an angel of light.

The anti-life movement is a master of this trick. Abortion is “choice.” Assisted suicide is “death with dignity.” Eugenics is “eradicating disease.”

But every now and then, the veil slips. In the case of abortion, we saw this in cases such as that of Dr. Kermit Gosnell – the mass-murdering “abortionist” who made the mistake of killing his victims moments after birth, rather than before.

For this, he received life in prison.

During Gosnell’s trial, the world was transfixed by grotesque stories of children born alive, and then having their necks slit. Or stories of how Gosnell kept a macabre collection of the bodies and body parts of his victims.

The pro-abortion movement responded by assuring everyone that Gosnell was an anomaly. That he did not represent abortionists in general. The law was designed to prevent such monstrosities, and in this case, it had worked.

That is, no doubt, partially true. Gosnell was uniquely malevolent, and sociopathic. There are many abortionists who specialize only in earlier-term abortions, because they feel deeply uncomfortable with later-term abortions. This is hardly to justify what they do. But it does suggest that they have limits.

And yet, it is not the case with Gosnell who was so much of an outlier that his example could be dismissed. While many abortion facilities in the United States have limits on how late they will abort, they are almost always willing to refer to those abortionists who have no such limits.

Abortion Relies on Hiding the Developing Child

In the U.S., the pro-abortion media has repeatedly lionized abortionists who “specialize” in the business of ending the lives of children who are fully formed. Such abortionists must, on a daily basis, look at the dismembered bodies of children that they have killed, and be unmoved in their conscience.

Inevitably the media portrays such abortionists as playing a heroic role in being willing to step forward to “help” woman who are always described as being in the most desperate of cases: women whose lives are in danger, or whose children are severely disabled.

In reality, as pro-life activists know all too well, such abortionists do not restrict their “services” to such extreme cases. If a woman wants her preborn child killed, and she has enough money to pay for their specialized services, they will do it, not questions asked. And they will justify it in the name of “choice.”

Abortion Relies on Hiding the Developing Child

Evil thrives in obscurity.

The pro-abortion movement has successfully convinced many people that the child in the first trimester is just a “blob of tissue.” As we know, this is complete nonsense. From the moment of conception there exists a genetically unique, living human being.

However, because the developing child is hidden, and because in the earliest stages it looks less like a fully developed child, people are more willing to look away.

But nobody believes that this is true of the child later in pregnancy. No child in the third trimester can possibly be described as a “blob of tissue.” Nearly everyone by this point has seen late-term ultrasounds.

Nevertheless, the abortion movement can still hide behind obfuscation and misdirection, suggesting that abortions of such late-term children only happen in the most extreme cases, if at all.

Courage, Truth, and the Fight Against Cultural Blindness

It takes courageous and creative pro-life activists, like Golob, Lila Rose, and so many others, to peel back the veil of confusion, and throw the harsh light of day upon what goes on behind closed doors. To show the true extremism of the pro-abortion movement.

“The entire feeling was incredibly stressful, sad, and difficult,” Golob told First Things of her experience. “My only hope is that going into such dark places shines a bright light into the abortion industry and what they tell women; the tactics they use; and above all, how late they are willing to perform or refer for an abortion for no medical reason.”