WINNIPEG, October 12, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – With less than a week to go before the federal election, Winnipeggers got a sobering look at the abortion issue as a busload of young interns and staff from the Association for Reformed Political Action and a hundred-plus Manitobans planted 100,000 tiny red or blue flags in front of the provincial legislature.
Winnipeg’s Memorial Park was only the second location on the LifeTour mounted by ARPA and We Need A Law that saw the organization’s full complement of flags planted all at once in a public place. Burlington, Ontario’s Central Park was the other: one flag for each pre-born Canadian baby aborted annually.
“It went very smoothly,” said We Need A Law campaign director Mike Schouten. “There were 100 volunteers waiting for us when we arrived from Thunder Bay and they had the flags planted in an hour.”
The display was installed by 8:45 am in Memorial Park, between the Legislature and the court house and near the University of Manitoba, “So we had lots of good conversations with people,” said Schouten, before the flags were packed away by 4 p.m.
The tour proposes three measures in particular. The first is a ban on late-term abortions, about which there is serious division within the pro-life movement. The national political pro-life organization, Campaign Life Coalition, is strongly opposed to such “gestational” proposals because it believes they give contradictory messages to the nation about the value of every human life and what the pro-life movement really stands for. The other “incremental” messages promoted by the tour enjoy wide pro-life movement acceptance. They are a ban on sex-selection abortions (which mostly target female pre-born babies) and a law protecting pre-born victims of crime.
The main thrust of the tour is a series of speaking engagements, mostly with pro-life groups but a few with neutral college audiences, with the purpose of equipping pro-lifers to inject the issue into the election. The equipment handed out includes lawn signs, pamphlets and questionnaires to be given to candidates detailing their position on life issues.
“We are action-oriented,” said Schouten, adding that when Christians are presented with coherent activities to advance the cause of life, their apathy often turns to enthusiastic participation. “We have to let our light shine,” he added.
Hostile passersby at the flag display are often defused with questions, said Schouten. Thus, if someone says unborn babies are parasites, a volunteer might respond with “Do you believe in human rights?” followed by “What species is the offspring produced by two human beings mating?” and so on.
Joan Dawkins of the misnamed Women’s Health Clinic, one of the city’s abortion facilities, took a different tack. “Reproductive healthcare is not up for debate,” she said in statement issued yesterday. “Many levels of government have stated that abortion is not on the table for discussion…This is a health care issue. A loud, anti-choice minority tries to reopen this issue every year but we know that the majority of Canadians believe in a woman's right to choose.”
However, a 2013 Angus Reid Institute survey indicated that only a minority of Canadians support unrestricted abortions. Other polls indicate a vast majority oppose sex-selection abortions.
LifeTour will end after 19 stops across Canada in Vancouver on Oct.17.