“If pro-abortionists were in power in Canada at the time I was born,” said Rev. Bernice Gerard, MA, “I wouldn’t have been.” Her mother had been institutionalized in a psychiatric institute for 40 years. Today, a pregnant woman in such circumstances would be a prime candidate for abortion. Fortunately for Rev. Gerard, her father and the authorities at the time held more enlightened views.

Rev. Gerard, a minister with the Evangelical Church and radio TV talk-show host in B.C. for many years, gave a stirring address: “Fight the Good Fight, Keep Faith With Life,” at a workshop at the National Symposium on Human Life, held early in October at the Bayview Glen Church, Thornhill, Ontario. A woman of striking appearance and forceful delivery, she tried to tear away the veil of apathy which prevents many Christians from getting involved in the right-to-life issue.

Rev. Gerard said, “The most dangerous place of habitat in Canada is in the mother’s womb. In Vancouver, the unborn have a 50 per cent chance of surviving the prenatal experience. We kill as many as we keep.”

Rev. Gerard has been active in the pro-life movement since 1973, a tireless speaker and promoter of numerous pro-life causes. She said, “This is a big issue and God have mercy on the Christians who sit by with their committees and their seminars and their papers and their talk if they don’t get out and make an impact on their society on this issue!”

A Burnaby, B.C. abortionist is suing her for libel, along with Betty Green, president of the Vancouver Right to Life Society for comments they made on the CJOR Sunday Line phone-in show recently.

Betty had informed her that it appeared that one local abortion hadn’t been done well and the woman later found parts of the baby in the toilet bowel. Rev. Gerard exclaimed, “Oh, he botched that one! That was a bad abortion!”

“Oh, is there such a thing as a good abortion?” Betty asked. This – and mentioning his name – was enough to get her sued. The B.C. pro-life movement is strongly supporting her on the grounds of free speech.

Rev. Gerard said that in 1972 alone, the abortion juggernaut destroyed approximately as many little Canadians as the total Canadians lost in World War II.

She said: “When the pro-life movement submitted 370,000 signatures protesting abortion to Pierre Elliot Trudeau, prime minister at the time, he was not impressed and said the pro-choice movement could do a lot better.” Later, she said, 1,000,000 signatures were presented to Brian Mulroney in Ottawa, they were also ignored.

“Abortion, it has been admitted now, was only the first step in creating a society where “useless lives” might be disposed of,” said Rev. Gerard. “The idea that the pro-born can be destroyed is now applied at the other end of life.”

It has been proposed that comatose patients with no meaningful life are worthy of removal. But many won’t die and the American Bar Association has described them as “biologically tenacious.”

They are not treated in any way but kept alive with food and water as “treatment,” which can also be withdrawn. This is the natural extension of non-personhood – the death ethic. It is active euthanasia. Most nursing personnel are not willing to supervise the starvation. Someone, she said, even claimed that lethal injection was more humane!

Within five years, a prominent pro-life lawyer has predicted that in the State of Washington, facilities will be licensed to give fatal injections to these non-persons. We don’t have eons of time, Rev. Gerard warned, to head off this situation in Canada.

Doctors must reject the death ethic for reverence fro life, she urged, and not head backwards to Nazi Germany. We should be able to see the danger signals for our society.

She denounced the medicalization of killing – the imagery of killing in the name of healing that was crucial to the Nazi goal of race purification. The heart of the Nazi program was destruction of the boundary between healing and killing.

The parallel is starting in our own era when so many millions are killed by saline solutions and curettage. The west has become more inclined, she claimed, to follow the Nazi course.