March 8, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In the wake of Canada’s sex-selection abortion controversy, a group of young women from across the country are using this year’s International Women’s Day to challenge Canadians to re-think their opinion on abortion. Holding large, bloody abortion photos along with prenatal imagery, young women from Vancouver to Ottawa confronted passersby Thursday.
UBC student Ania Kasprzak will be leading her club in displaying the controversial Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) on campus today, which compares abortion to the Holocaust.
“Because abortion kills pre-born children, it is a human rights violation, not a woman’s right,” she said. If it’s wrong to discriminate based on religion or skin colour, it’s also wrong to discriminate based on age. And the pre-born are simply younger than the rest of us.”
Stephanie Gray, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CCBR), the group behind the graphic protests, said her group’s study of successful social reform movements reveals the important role visuals play in achieving cultural change.
“Injustice that is invisible inevitably becomes tolerable,” she said. “So by making the ‘choice’ of abortion visible as the act of violence that it is, it will become intolerable.” Gray will be at UBC today and tomorrow.
The women plan to stand with their signs on busy streets in Calgary, Prince George, Toronto, and Ottawa, along with at the University of British Columbia campuses. They plan to engage Canadians on the topic of what real human rights are.
In Calgary, the group will be circulating literature from its controversial postcard project, a campaign they started last week by circulating graphic postcards in thousands of Calgarians’ mail boxes. They plan to circulate their postcard featuring a quote by anti-abortion suffragette Alice Paul who said, “How can one protect and help women by killing them as babies?”
“On International Women’s Day we stand for all women,” said Ruth Shaw, CCBR’s “Choice” Chain Training Director, “including those who are being slaughtered in the name of women’s rights. Real women’s rights protect the rights of all women. And if we shouldn’t kill pre-born babies because they’re girls, shouldn’t we protect the lives of the pre-born because they are human?”