PROTEST
More than 25,000 Christians gathered last month on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to attend Canada’s largest prolife rally to date.
Organized by Christians For Life (CFL), an interdenominational organization based in Ottawa, the rally featured Nobel Peace Prize winner Mother Teresa.
Rally organizers hoped “to encourage Parliament to enact a law to protect the unborn child.” A previous law, struck down by Canada’s Supreme Court last January, restricted abortions to accredited hospitals and only when the mother’s “life or health” was in danger.
Despite Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s promise to deal with the issue, Parliament voted this summer against legislation that would have restricted abortions. (Currently, abortions are not restricted by law in Canada.) In the wake of that decision and the unlikelihood of government action on abortion before a federal election expected later this year, many prolife groups shifted tactics.
“We haven’t been promoting letter-writing campaigns of late,” says James A. Sclater, assistant to the president at Focus on the Family/Canada. Prior antiabortion efforts had relied heavily on letter-writing campaigns aimed at influencing legislators. Now, however, says Sclater, “we want to see who’s elected before we begin writing.”
Consequently, Canadian prolife groups are encouraging voters to fight abortion at the polls. “We have to be single-issue voters,” Alliance for Life director Heather Stilwell told supporters at the Ottawa rally. “If a candidate is not prolife, we cannot and must not vote for him.”
CLF president Jim Hughes agreed, saying a failure to send prolife legislators would make voters “responsible for a continuation of a holocaust.”
Commenting on the massive rally on Parliament Hill, a spokesperson for the Canadian Abortion Rights League said, “Those numbers certainly don’t translate into the ability to put in some sort of regressive legislation—and it doesn’t translate into electoral votes—as I’m sure they hoped it would.”
Given the political realities of an imminent election it is unlikely that Canada’s prolife groups will see Canada enact a new abortion law any time soon.
By John Stanhope.
