Pro-life advocate draws attention to Alberta rule denying care for premature babies due to cost

(LifeSiteNews) – A pro-life and family advocate is sounding the alarm that current rules in place by healthcare officials in his province have resulted in many premature babies being simply “left to die” due to what he described as a lack of medical care. 

Richard Dur, who serves as the volunteer executive director of Prolife Alberta, noted in a recent opinion piece published by the Western Standard that the governing framework for managing extremely premature delivery in his province means many lives go unsaved.

Dur pointed out that Alberta Health Services (AHS) guideline HCS-183-01 “addresses clinical management around extremely early preterm birth.”

Section 6.5 of the document, Dur warned, “contains language that deserves public scrutiny.”

“The survival of infants born before or at 22 6/7 completed weeks of gestation remains uncommon. A non-interventional approach is recommended,” the guidelines read.

In response to this guideline, Dur noted, the reality of it means, “Put plainly: babies born younger than 23 weeks’ gestation are left to die.”

“No one is arguing that every extremely premature infant will survive. But when trying can mean the difference between life and death, policies that discourage or disallow it must meet the highest possible standard of justification,” he wrote.

Dur said that such policies should always “err on the side of life,” and he took a shot at AHS officials for having this policy in place.

“How care frameworks are written and applied within systems like AHS should matter deeply to all of us: When policy pre-decides non-intervention based on gestational thresholds alone, it risks determining whether care is even attempted — placing bureaucracy above ethics, medicine, and family,” he said.

“Somewhere, perhaps even today, another delivery room will go quiet. Another child will arrive earlier than anyone hoped or expected. Another team will face that moment: try or don’t try.”

Dur said in other provinces such as Ontario that care teams are pushing “boundaries once thought immovable. Hospitals provide care at gestational ages that, only a decade ago, were dismissed as impossible.”

He also brought up that at University of Iowa Health Care, clinicians are already “treating some babies born just after 21 weeks when parents request it.”

“Not because survival is guaranteed. But because it is no longer impossible,” he said.

Dur said Alberta needs to do better, like in Ontario, when it comes to helping premature babies’ odds of survival.

“Hopefully, for the sake of that infant and her parents, that child is born in a system like those operating in Ontario — where parents have a meaningful say in the level of care their child will receive — instead of Alberta, where policy will still default to “a non-interventional approach,” he wrote. 

“For a province that prides itself on setting standards, not lagging behind them, we should be asking whether this reflects who we believe we really are.”

Dur’s concerns over premature baby care needs extra attention, considering Canada could be one step closer to allowing euthanasia, or so-called “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD), for newborns should a provincial medical college get its way.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, the Quebec College of Physicians is on record suggesting that “medical assistance in dying may be an appropriate treatment for babies suffering from extreme pain.”

There were 368,928 babies born in Canada from 2024 to 2025, a number that would be much greater if not for abortion. For context, in 2022, 97,211 Canadian babies were killed by abortion.