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'I stand here today to tell you that abortion...is much worse than slavery,' Culture of Life Africa's Obianuju Ekeocha told the packed room of students.Claire Chretien / LifeSiteNews

OTTAWA, May 19, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Students and young adults learned about pro-life activism and pro-life apologetics at the National March for Life Youth Conference in Ottawa on May 13, the day after the march. The event was co-organized by Niagara Region Right to Life and Campaign Life Coalition.

“I’m a black person, but I stand here today to tell you that abortion—this injustice that we have today—is much worse than slavery,” Obianuju Ekeocha, the founder of Culture of Life Africa, told the room packed with students.  “If you think slavery was bad, abortion is so much worse…it is about killing, extermination.  It is an infringement on the right to life and that is the first human right.”

Slavery was “very convenient at the time” it was legal, Ekeocha said, and those who perpetuated the system that allowed it to continue were “pro-choice.”  They may not have wanted slaves, but they believed, “it’s not my business if my neighbor gets one,” Ekeocha explained.

Ekeocha compared the abortion advocates to advocates of slavery: both dehumanize their victims and use the legal system to their advantage.

Abortion “is a billion dollar industry,” said Ekeocha.  “So removing it means removing all of that.  But slavery was removed, and it was also a billion dollar industry.” 

“When history is written and we stand there, we will still be that generation that lived at a time when babies were killed in hospitals,” said Ekeocha.  “Abortion will be the damage of our century.”

Ekeocha showed the students a photo of two smiling abortion facility escorts.

“The face of injustice is so beautiful,” said Ekeocha.  “It has foundation cream on…primer, nice mascara…and they go out, and they lead children to the slaughter.”

One day, photos of smiling, attractive abortion advocates will be in a museum alongside the Planned Parenthood logo, Ekeocha said, and people will be able to see how “beautiful the people who pushed death” were.

Ekeocha said her prayer is that one day “our work and our sufferings and all that we are going through now” defending life will be commemorated.  But in order for that to happen, Ekeocha said, pro-lifers must not be passive in their efforts.

Everyone must decide “to start doing something to end this holocaust, this genocide of abortion,” she said.

Ekeocha’s speech, which was titled From Opposing Slavery to Opposing Abortion: Our Thirst & Quest for Authentic Justice for Civilized Society, received a standing ovation. 

Prepare for persecution

At a panel discussion later in the morning, pro-life youth leaders Christian Naggar, Cameron Grant, Teresa Mervar, and Maggie McAuley gave students advice on how to prepare themselves for persecution from university student unions and administrators.

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Students should run their pro-life clubs with the idea in mind that they will be scrutinized by their student unions and administrators, they said, and should always be prepared to lovingly offer the pro-life position in conversations with friends and strangers.

“We have truth on our side,” said Grant.

Naggar, a student at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), is suing The Student Association at Durham College and UOIT for discriminating against his pro-life club, Speak for the Weak. 

Following Speak for the Weak’s ratification application to the student union, “we were invited to a meeting to discuss ‘in further detail’ the application,” Naggar told LifeSiteNews.  “They informed us that they had decided to refuse our application, and that was it.”

Despite a letter from Naggar’s lawyers, the Student Association at Durham College and OUIT stood by their decision.

“We are seeing them in court sometime over the summer,” said Naggar.  He said he is hopeful Speak for the Weak will prevail and encouraged students to persevere through any on-campus persecution or discrimination they may face.

Student unions are there to represent the rights and needs of all students, said Naggar, and that includes pro-life students.

“We are on the right side of history and the truth is on our side,” said Naggar.

Other speakers echoed the message that the pro-life movement is on the right side of history.  Steve Karlen, the Director of North American Campaigns for 40 Days for Life, told students it’s important that they speak the truth about abortion in order to change people’s minds.

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“When people learn what abortion is, they no longer support it,” said Karlen. 

‘We should be willing to make sacrifices’

Maaike Rosendal, the Campus Outreach Director at the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform (CCBR) and the afternoon keynote speaker, also compared the pro-life movement to the civil rights movement.  She shared with students the story of James Zwerg, a white civil rights activist who had nothing to gain and everything to lose by joining his African-American friends on the famous Freedom Rides.

“Let me go first,” he said to his fellow riders as he stepped into a mob that beat the activists with baseball bats and broke James’s nose and vertebrae.

“We’re prepared to die,” James said from the hospital afterward.

“The reason I tell you this story is because I think there are similarities between the role James played in the civil rights movement” and the role we play in the pro-life movement, Rosendal told students.  “James joined a movement not for himself, but for others.  He fought for the rights of others…the pro-life movement is not our movement.  It is the movement of children who cannot speak up for themselves.  We need to do it for them.”

“In that way, we should be willing to make sacrifices like James did, like other freedom riders did,” said Rosendal.

Rosendal taught students a basic but thorough course in defending the pro-life position.  She said in order to have an effective discussion about abortion, students should always turn the conversation back to the question: What is the pre-born?

“If the pre-born are nothing more than a bunch of cells…then I am a horrible person for going up in front of audiences,” and advocating for restricting women’s rights, Rosendal said.  But “if the pre-born is a human being just like you and me, deserving of human rights, and abortion kills them, then abortion is always wrong.”

Size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency are what make a child in the womb different from other human beings, and none of those factors make children in the womb less human than born humans, Rosendal explained.

She also encouraged students to show their intellectual opponents that if a developing embryo or fetus has human parents, then it is a human.

“What kind of embryo?  You also have dog embryos.  You also have elephant fetuses.  Those words are age classifications.  They don’t actually tell you what something is, they tell you how old it is,” said Rosendal.

Rosendal said the three vital questions students can use to get their peers to recognize the humanity of the pre-born child are:

  1. If something is growing, isn’t it alive?
  2. If you have human parents, aren’t you human?
  3. We have human rights, don’t we?

She compared pro-lifers saying we must defend the pre-born without showing what abortion does to tiny human beings to telling a victim of drunk driving that she can only share her story if she hides her scars.

“If we can’t even face them, how can we fight for them?” asked Rosendal.  “We need to be willing to do what is as effective as possible,” and that includes showing the public photos of abortion victims.

“The bad news today is abortion,” continued Rosendal.  “The bad news is that by tonight, when we lay our heads on our pillows, 300 children who grow in the safety of their mother’s womb this morning, by tonight will have been discarded into medical waste bins.  But the good news?  The good news is that can change.”

Rosendal shared the story of a CCBR intern whose conversation with a pregnant woman and her partner was inspired by abortion victim photography and resulted in the couple choosing life instead of abortion.

“I can’t do that to my baby,” the mother said.  Throughout her pregnancy, CCBR staff accompanied her to doctors’ appointments and heard “the heartbeat of a little baby who was supposed to be on the bottom of an abortionist’s trashcan,” said Rosendal.

Zwerg suffered greatly and didn’t gain anything personally from participating in the civil rights movement, Rosendal said.  But he wasn’t in the movement for himself.

“We can [choose to] go on with our lives comfortably,” Rosendal concluded.  “But for pre-born children, everything is on the line.”