Friday June 11, 2010
Alberta Pro-Life Campaign Makes Splash in Local Media
By Patrick B. Craine
LETHBRIDGE, Alberta, June 11, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Canadian pro-life group is making waves across southern Alberta this week as they travel through communities showing graphic images that expose the truth about abortion.
The Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CCBR) began a week-long tour Monday, cruising highways and community streets with an 11-meter long box-bodied truck bearing billboards showing aborted human beings. At the same time, CCBR staff are taking to the sidewalks with hand-held versions of the graphic images on the truck, in order to engage passersby with even more information.
The campaign has made a splash in local media, with spots on CTV and Global TV in Lethbridge. A number of Calgary radio stations have covered it throughout the week, and CCBR founders Stephanie Gray and Jose Ruba have been featured on local talk shows.
In an interview with LifeSiteNews, Gray singled out CTV’s coverage, calling it “amazing.” The 3-minute spot showed close-ups of the graphic images, and featured interviews with 3 of the campaign members, including Gray. One of them was a woman who shared her guilt and regret for having had an abortion. “No one tells you that you’re going to feel guilt,” she explained. “You have to ask why. … Why do I feel guilty? And maybe the reason you feel guilty is because you’ve done something wrong.”
The spot did not focus on the negative reactions, simply noting that some walk by and “others feel the need to express their point of view,” and the anchor even plugged the group’s presentation for the following night.
The coverage of the campaign has been “great,” said Gray. “I think what this shows the pro-life movement is that when we begin to engage the culture as pro-lifers, taking our message to the public square with the reality of what abortion looks like, then we get people talking and we reopen the debate, which, as we all know, desperately needs to be reopened.”
The week-long tour is called the “Reproductive ‘Choice’ Campaign”. The project was launched in Calgary in 2007, and has been run multiple times a week since, but this is the first time it has been taken outside Calgary.
According to Gray, the campaign aims to “save lives and change minds.” “Our expectation, as we have seen time and again, is that when people see the pictures and listen and reason through the arguments, that they come to a pro-life conclusion.”
Stopping in small communities along the way, they left Calgary Monday, making their way south towards Lethbridge, stopping there Tuesday and Wednesday. On Friday they went east towards Medicine Hat, where they will spend the weekend, and then head back to Calgary.
Gray noted that this trip through Southern Alberta is just the beginning of the project’s expansion. “In the next two or so years, as our permanent staff expand in number, we definitely will be expanding our approach in other cities across the country,” she said.