Critical Analysis of Health Canada

“Health Canada Inadvertently Discloses Facts Planned Parenthood Would Like to Suppress” an essay by Ted Byfield, a Western Canadian journalist and founder of an Alberta based magazine The Report. “Health Canada” appears to have logical strengths including a cause and effect argument supported by statistics and reference to authorities present on both sides of the case. One must look closer into the strengths and weakness’ of Byfield’s argument to see that although the statistics seem impressive, they in reality do not support his point. With this one can determine that his causal argument fails to be valid in assessing population decline.

In this essay, Byfield suggests that Canadians are working too hard, and with the demands of work they are putting off having children which is in turn leading to a population decline that will have negative economic consequences in the Western world. He begins by discussing past notions of a “population explosion” (222), which was a prediction of the world to be over crowded, a prediction that never presented itself. Byfield further supports this when he uses an appeal to authority, Paul Ehrlich’s prediction that by 1980 “65 million Americans would die of starvation” (222). As he progresses through his argument he writes about the real problem not to be a serious population decline, but a “birth dearth” (222). He goes on to reference a journalists writing about government credibility being ruined for the belief in overpopulation changing to the now declining population. Byfield continues his argument by bringing forth an abundance of facts and figures regarding the falling birth rates in both developed and undeveloped countries. He adds emotion in his writing when he calls Planned Parenthood a “zealous preacher of the Save-the-World-with-Smaller-Families message” (223), which he then suggests that it is not very likely that they would go back on what they have said in the past. Byfield concludes by reinforcing that women must