By Hilary White
TORONTO, February 6, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) of Ontario has declared itself to be a pro-abortion organization and that pro-life students’ groups are, as a matter of policy, not welcome on Canadian university campuses. At their January conference, the organization that represents 300,000 full and part-time students in Ontario, voted to support individual student unions that want to ban pro-life groups from campus.
The move comes in response to an attempt by students at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay to gain official club status for their pro-life group. The Gazette, the daily student paper of the University of Western Ontario, said that a representative at the meeting said that the Lakehead University group had “behaved inappropriately in the past”.
Sandy Hudson, the CFS-Ontario Women’s Commissioner, compared allowing an “anti-choice group” to allowing a white supremacist group on campus.
The pro-life students at Lakehead, Life Support, are considering making a complaint against the Lakehead student union to the Ontario Human Rights Commission. The group’s representative, Francisco Gomez Jimenez, said the treatment of his group by the student union was “thoroughly discriminatory”. Campaign Life Coalition British Columbia head, John Hof, said the response from student unions across the country is a matter of freedom of expression and could be dealt with by a lawsuit in the regular courts.
The decision by the CFS was welcomed by Joyce Arthur, coordinator of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada and perhaps Canada’s most aggressive abortion promoter. She told the Gazette that pro-life supporters are comparable to Neo-Nazi groups and should receive no support from student unions.
Ms. Arthur is not known in the Canadian press for moderating her enthusiasm for abortion. When Nicole Kidman recently announced to the press that she was “thrilled” at being pregnant, Arthur accused the American actress of discouraging young women from abortion. “It certainly shows any young women watching these movies or following these celebrities that the best option is to have the baby and it glorifies that choice,” Arthur said.
In 2006, upon the revelation that women in Canada were using abortion for sex-selective purposes, to kill a disproportionate number of baby girls, Arthur responded, “Being pro-choice means supporting a woman’s right to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy for whatever reason, even if one personally does not agree with her reason.”
Another Pro-Life Student Group Denied Official Club Status
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jan/08011407.html