On Katie’s first appointment at the abortuary, next door to the Aid Women Office in downtown Toronto, she didn’t see any pro-life signs. However, on the second day, when she returned to the abortuary for a laminaria insertion (a seaweed-like substance that facilitates abortion in late pregnancy), she noticed Anne standing across the street with her favourite sandwich-board sign that read, “Please Can We Help You?” on one side and “Help Stop All Abortions” on the other. It attracted her attention.
Across the street, sidewalk counsellor Robert noticed Katie, and observed that her face seemed to soften the more she glanced at Anne and her sign. So he approached her. Gently, he said, “We don’t want you or your baby to be harmed.” Then he invited her up to the office to talk about her situation. She accepted.
Robert and Joanne showed her a fetal model of a 20-week-old baby, then talked about the consequences of abortion and about her problems. The father of her child was married with a child of his own and was pressuring her to have an abortion. Her pro-life, Christian parents were unaware of her pregnancy and she was living at home. Still, Katie seemed to waver. Joanne, with her long experience in pro-life counselling, looked at 19-year-old Katie, a factory worker from smalltown Ontario, and decided that she deserved to know the truth about late-term abortions.
She told Katie that her baby would be destroyed by tearing it apart and removing it in pieces from her womb because her womb was not ready to open and expand as it would naturally when the baby was ready to be born. Katie’s eyes welled up. She was appalled.
Then Joanne showed her a picture of two-year-old Amber, whose mother had also been five months’ pregnant and had been planning an abortion when she changed her mind. This coincidence was not lost on Katie. Within minutes, she accepted Robert’s offer to accompany her the next day to St. Michael’s Hospital to have the laminaira removed and thus save her baby by avoiding an abortion.
After the hospital procedure, Robert found her a place to rest for a day, and gave her two bus tickets for the ride home with her girlfriend and one of Mrs. Notten’s prayer blankets. As it turned out, Katie later told Robert that her parents, dismayed at first about her pregnancy, were now supportive and relieved that she did not have the abortion.
In reflecting on Katie’s story, Robert believes it was providential that Anne was standing across the street that day with her sidewalk sign at the time of Katies’s second abortuary appointment.
