WINNIPEG (CP) - The Manitoba government must appeal a court ruling ordering it to pay for abortions in private clinics to protect its right to decide how health-care dollars are spent, Health Minister Tim Sale said Thursday.

Sale said the case, which he believes is being closely watched by his colleagues in Alberta and Ontario, reaches far beyond the abortion debate. It could affect the way governments handle long waiting lists for other procedures, such as hip and knee replacements.

"We can't turn over to individual people the planning of the health-care system, no matter how strongly we might feel about their rights to the procedure," said Sale.

Associate Chief Justice Jeffrey Oliphant said last month that provisions in the province's Health Services Insurance Act that make women pay for abortions outside public hospitals violates their rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Oliphant's written decision also took note of the time constraints many women are under when trying to book an abortion.

"There is no reason or logic behind the impugned legislation which prevents women from having access to therapeutic abortions in a timely way," wrote the judge.

The decision cleared the way for a lawsuit by the hundreds of women who had to bear the cost of the procedure.

Two women started the class action against the NDP government in 2001. It is now on hold pending the appeal.

The women said they had no choice but to pay for abortions at the private Morgentaler clinic because the wait for a publicly funded procedure at a hospital was four to eight weeks.

At the time the lawsuit was filed, Manitoba and New Brunswick were the only two provinces that did not fund abortions outside hospitals.

Last year, Manitoba began funding the procedure at a not-for-profit clinic in Winnipeg.

Federal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh warned New Brunswick this week it could face dispute resolution and financial penalties for refusing to pay for abortions in private clinics.

Premier Bernard Lord said women have enough access because the province pays for abortions in hospitals, provided they have been deemed medically necessary by two doctors.

Sale said the government acknowledges waiting lists for various procedures are a problem in Manitoba. But the province supports a woman's right to an abortion and hopes to have a "reproductive care centre" open by the end of the year, he added.

Robert Tapper, the lawyer spearheading the class action suit, scoffed at the government's position, calling it "rigidly pro-life."

He said Oliphant's ruling clearly applies only to abortion access and not other procedures.

"I don't think this government has an honourable or reasonable position to advance with respect to health care," said Tapper.

"This case is not about health care generally, this case is about abortion funding - nothing more, nothing less."

A Manitoba constitutional expert says the case will be closely followed across Canada because it goes "to the core of some of the most fundamental issues in Canadian society right now" - rising health-care costs and the freedom provinces have to experiment and ration.

But Bryan Schwartz, a law professor at the University of Manitoba, said the government is taking a risk by using an abortion case to test the limits of the charter in the area of health care.

"There's a lot of intellectual and emotional considerations with the abortion case that may not arise in other fields," said Schwartz.

"Maybe the best area to test the theoretical limits of how much the charter influences health-care policy isn't this particular case."