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Dr. Ney's ambitious project seeks to 'rehumanize' the unborn child.

You crawl in to something that is part-cave and part funhouse: dark, quiet. There is a small cavity you lie in on your side, on a shallow waterbed that is comfortingly warm.

A video begins to play before you as a rhythmic throbbing permeates your space. You watch a stream of images showing conception, cell splitting and reformation – the at-first slow, then more quick growth of a human being.

In addition to the heartbeat, you are treated to a song, “Awake! O Sleeper,” performed by Irish singer Joanea Hogg. By the end of your half hour you feel a fraternal affinity for the unborn baby pictured, with his innocent, open gaze, who is now turning sleepy summersaults in evident eagerness to take on the world.

This wheeled combination of fibreglass, steel and medium-high technology is CYRYB (Can You Remember Your Baby-days?).

It is the latest fruit of the many brainstorms of Dr. Philip Ney, a Victoria B.C. psychiatrist known for his pioneer work in the rehabilitation of  troubled youth, researching the link between child abuse and abortion, offering women cash for unborn babies they would otherwise abort, and now training counsellors in 27 countries in Christ-centred group psychotherapy for those psychologically and spiritually traumatized by abortion.

The idea is to give people at least a chance to remember their time in the womb and their birth.

“When people remember their preborn life, they discover the continuity of living,” Dr. Ney said.

The project dovetails neatly with his thinking on abortion, which puts it within a cycle of abuse and dehumanization. He argues that people who have been abused as children find it easier to abuse or abort their own children.

“When people are dehumanized it is so much easier to torture, enslave, murder, abandon, scapegoat and abort them,” he says.

But “because this experience [CYRYB] evokes memories of life and thought before birth, it rehumanizes the preborn baby.”

Not everyone will manage to recover prenatal memories, Dr. Ney admits, but everyone will come away from CYRYB with a greater appreciation of the beginning of human life. He sees newly pregnant women and their husbands and mothers and children going through (two can go in at the same time). “Couple bonding and parent-infant bonding is deepened when this remarkable experience is done in pairs.”

Housed in a 13-ft. by 8-ft. by 10-ft. trailer, CYRYB is designed to be easily towed behind a car or truck to a church or school parking lot, and to be built by handy pro-lifers around the world for a cost of $15,000 to $20,000 in parts.

Dr. Ney offers the plans to anyone for a nominal fee. “I want God to get the credit,” Dr. Ney told LifeSiteNews.

Among other projects Ney has ongoing are: Horizons Unbound Rehabilitation and Training Society (HURTS), which helps teens recover from substance abuse while cruising aboard a 72-ft. schooner; Mount Joy College, for training counsellors and trainers in post-abortive psychotherapy; and the International Hope Alive Counsellors Association (IHACA), which is holding its 12th annual conference in Warsaw this week.