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An AdWeek blogger is one of those who doesn’t like a new pro-life billboard now on display in Toronto, Canada:

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Toronto’s Niagara Region Right to Life organization blames abortion for the “coarsening of politics and civic life,” but they’re the ones guilt-tripping people with sad-toy-themed billboards a week before Christmas.

If this is the only alternative to all the inappropriately sexual Christmas ads I’ve been seeing, then bring on the smut.

Niagara Region Right to Life’s Suresh Dominic told me this morning the organization gets calls from both sides, supporters and opponents, when it erects its controversial crying toy billboard for a month each Christmas season, which it has been doing for five years.

“The other side is angry, but we are not angry,” said Dominic, who added the billboard wins converts.

“I got a call last year from a young doctor who was upset, telling me this should not go up at Christmas time, there are too many children going hungry and homeless,” said Dominic. “I asked her, because she was a doctor, ‘Do you believe live begins at the moment of conception?’ Finally she agreed and had a conversion of heart.”

Actually, this billboard concept has been around awhile. Wrote Dave Andrusko of National Right to Life today:

“Some Toys Will Have Fewer Children to Play With this Year” is not a new billboard.  I took a few minutes out and found (to my surprise) that we first ran this image on the back cover of National Right to Life News on December 7, 1981, three months after I had become editor!

I am not kidding when I say that over the years the billboard has evoked some of the worse responses from our benighted opposition that I’ve ever read. Why do pro-abortionists rage against the Toy soldier?…

As a friend described it to me, “The billboard drives the pro-choice side crazy and makes pro-lifers smile because of the implicit message that children are delightfully winsome creatures who play with toys and bring joy and innocence into this jaded and materialistic world.”

Reprinted with permission from JillStanek.com