CALGARY, Alberta, November 8, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – One of Canada’s leading pro-life organizations is stepping up its efforts with a campaign aimed at completely ending abortion in Canada within 20 years.
“We don’t exist merely to fight abortion, but to actually end the killing,” says Stephanie Gray, co-founder and executive director of the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform.
Last month, CCBR launched ‘EndtheKilling’, a vision for jump-starting pro-life activism across Canada through targeted educational campaigns and networking with pro-life groups throughout the country.
“We’re building an army, essentially, of foot soldiers,” explained Gray.
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She said the plan is not aiming to expand CCBR so much as to promote effective pro-life strategy.
“We want to see activism happening in all the major communities across the country, where pro-lifers are routinely on a weekly, if not daily basis, on public streets,” said Gray.
CCBR says it wants pro-lifers to hit the streets with a three-fold message: the reality of the injustice of abortion in visual form; the beauty and wonder of the preborn child in visual form using newer technologies like 3D ultrasound; and the impact abortion has on women.
Founded in 2001 by Gray and Jose Ruba, CCBR has made waves in towns and cities across the country with their use of large graphic images of aborted babies in projects such as the Reproductive “Choice” truck campaign, the Genocide Awareness Project, and the “Choice” Chain.
EndtheKilling involves an expansion of these projects, as well as other campaigns like visual-based lawn signs featuring a picture of the child in the womb, and literature drops of postcards and pamphlets. The literature will direct citizens to CCBR’s website, unmaskingchoice.ca, which features a detailed section on pro-life apologetics.
CCBR will focus its own efforts especially on Calgary, where they are currently based, and Toronto, where they plan to open a second office in the near future. They are counting on support from local pro-life groups to reach communities across the country.
By 2020, the organization aims to have every person in Calgary exposed to the graphic abortion images at least weekly, and the same for Toronto by 2030.
“Injustice that is invisible inevitably becomes tolerable,” said Gray. “People just do not perceive the child to be a child. … Until a woman is more horrified of an abortion than she’s currently terrified of that unplanned pregnancy, she’s generally going to continue to go to an abortion clinic, instead of, say, a pregnancy help centre.”
She said they have learned that increased activism will require an equally great response of compassion as women come forward who have suffered through the pain of abortion.
“The more we have engaged the culture and been on the streets with the graphic images, the more we are encountering the wounded,” she explained. “If we are going to ramp up our efforts to expose what abortion has done, then correspondingly we need to ramp up our efforts to let women know that there is help, that there is healing, that there are women who have been there, done that, and regret it, and they’ve changed.”
Gray emphasized that the sheer scope of the 20-year campaign will require “a lot of manpower.”
“This campaign certainly requires a lot of volunteer help, a lot of people using their free time to do pro-life activism instead of watching TV,” she said. “But there needs to be a very large, strong foundation of full-time staffers. So we’re continuing to recruit more people to work either full-time with us or full-time with an existing pro-life organization.”
She said the plan came about as the group approached its 10th anniversary this year. “We realized that it’s not really a time for celebration but a time for reflection and a time for mourning that we have to continue to exist because babies continue to be killed,” she explained.
“We thought we need to really evaluate our past ten years and put a plan together that will result in us saturating the culture with the pro-life message, with the brutality of abortion in order to really end this thing.”
For more information on the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform and its EndtheKilling campaign, visit their website here.