TORONTO, October 12, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) — Ages vary, so do skin colours and religious affiliations; and numbers fluctuate widely from year to year, but one thing is consistent across the 28 years and 237 Canadian communities where LifeChain continues to be held each Fall: the positive energy shared by those on hand to stand up for Life, mixed with sadness at the missing millions of children lost to abortion.
In hundreds of U.S. communities and in every province of Canada except Prince Edward Island (PEI) there were LifeChains on Sunday Oct. 4. PEI’s turn will come in a few weeks. The Toronto area alone had LifeChains at more than 50 intersections.
“The numbers were down a bit this year,” said one anonymous organizer of a Life Chain in Victoria, B.C. on a busy four-lane thoroughfare in front of a shopping mall. “But everyone who comes is so happy to be here—the cause is such a good one—it makes up for the numbers.”
Meanwhile, at the other end of Vancouver Island, the side-by-side communities of Courtenay-Comox drew more than 100 to their LifeChain.
“LifeChain is the most exposed form of public witness we have,” Deny Dieleman of Campaign Life Coalition told LifeSiteNews. “No other pro-life activity brings this issue before so many eyeballs. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians see these signs as they drive by, people who never talk about abortion, people who rarely think about it. In Canada the abortion issue is completely hidden, unless we bring it up.”
“You drive by 30, 40, 50 people carrying signs saying ‘Abortion Kills Children’ – that has to have a huge effect on some of them,” said Dieleman.
She tells of a woman with a child who came to the Toronto office of Campaign Life Coalition and asked, “Are you the people who hold up those signs on the side of the street?” “’Yes,’ we said. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘If it weren’t for you my child wouldn’t be here.’”
Four messages predominated on the signage: “Abortion kills children,” “Adoption the loving option,” “Abortion hurts women, and “Life the first inalienable right.”
Carrying a sign at a LifeChain may be “the first little step someone takes into being active, the first time they are willing to be seen by their neighbours who will say, ‘Look at goofy Mr. Smith out there with a sign,” said the CLC’s national organizer Mary Ellen Douglas, who participated in the LifeChain in her hometown Kingston.
Douglas told LifeSiteNews that some might consider the “Abortion kills children” sign too negative. “But it is nothing but the truth,” she responds. “What could be more positive than telling the truth?”