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Choice for Life, the pro-life group in Williams Lake, British Columbia, tried to be inoffensive when it asked city council to endorse a “Celebrate Life Week” proclamation that avoids any mention of abortion or pre-born children.

For its troubles, it now stands accused of a making “a cloaked attempt … to get this city to approve an anti-choice viewpoint.”

So charges Carrie Julius, who got on Vancouver’s Global News with her complaint. She also picketed city hall last Monday with a few supporters determined that Williams Lake should stay out of the abortion debate and rescind its unanimous support for Celebrate Life Week.

But Shannon Wedel, co-president of Choice For life, isn’t upset. “This doesn’t need to be a negative thing,” she told LifeSiteNews. “It could start a discussion. I was thinking of going down there [to City Hall] and taking Carrie some coffee.”

Mrs. Wedel said the city council has been proclaiming Celebrate Life Week for many years without a fuss. But Ms. Julius thinks this just means councillors were acting unthinkingly. Had they done their homework they would have realized that “The Choice for Life Society is a religious anti-abortion group,” whose website content “shocked” her.

So she urged City Council to take “more of a neutral stance on this subject. … I consider the vote in favour of this proclamation to be biased and not representative of all women’s rights. Why does our city council need be involved in such controversial matters such as the pro-choice vs. pro-life argument is beyond me.”  

While Ms. Julius wanted only neutrality from city council, she revealed her own convictions by quoting from the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, in comments to both Global News and the Williams Lake Tribune.  “Women have a constitutionally-based right to unrestricted, fully-funded abortion,” stated part of the quote, “without legal or other barriers or discrimination due to gender, class, ethnicity, race, age, location/region (or area of residence).”

The proclamation at the centre of the controversy made four affirmations: “that the most basic and valuable right is the right to life…that the value of every life is determined not by what he or she does or produces but rather by the fact that every human being is unique… that the measure of a civilization is judged by the care it gives to its weakest members…and Social justice demands that we involve ourselves in making society concerned about every life.”

City council did not back down, but issued a statement arguing that proclaiming something did not mean supporting it. “Council’s role in making proclamations is to help increase awareness of a social goal or movement (e.g. cancer prevention and awareness, Williams Lake’s Stampede season, elder abuse awareness, Legion Week) without endorsing the group or individual requesting the proclamation.”

Moreover, the council’s statement continued, the proclamation did not speak to the abortion debate at all, but only to the “value of human life.” So Council wasn’t about to rescind the proclamation in mid-Celebrate Life Week, but it would look at creating a policy for future proclamations.

As for Shannon Wedel, she told LifeSiteNews, the furor was “exciting,” The Choice for Life Society tried to write the proclamation in an inoffensive manner so that city council could pass it. Yet it still has turned out to be “a challenge to secular society” and its preoccupation with rights over responsibilities.

“Nobody has the right to say who lives and who dies,” she added. “Life is a gift from God that we have a responsibility to take care of.”