It started out as a typical Saturday morning for persistent pro-life activist Earl Amyotte of Windsor, Ont. Most Saturday mornings, Amyotte takes a trip to Detroit, and hikes from abortuary to abortuary to picket. But later in the day on Saturday, April 6, after a long, tough day of protesting, he was stopped at the Canadian border on his way back to Canada.

A Canadian Customs officer at the Ambassador Bridge asked Amyotte to open the trunk of his car. Inside were found three four-foot by four-foot pro-life signs, on which were graphic pictures of aborted fetuses, dismembered and decapitated.

The customs officer ended up confiscating two of the signs because he deemed the to be obscene.

Amyotte estimated he has made more than 120 trips across the border in recent years and has never had a problem. “This is an outrage,” said Amyotte. “The American customs officers have seen the photos and let me right through. I have carried these pickets all over Canada and the U.S. and never had a problem.”

After the two signs were seized, Amyotte was handed a notice of detention, which stated the signs were taken based on the “determination they may constitute obscenity or hate propaganda.”

Amyotte’s car was thoroughly searched twice before he was released. He was then allowed to proceed home without the two signs.

“Apparently, child pornography is considered art in Canada, but the pictures on my sign are obscene,” complained Amyotte, referring to a recent court ruling in B.C. that acquitted a man who wrote stories about torture and sexual abuse of young boys.

Amyotte, furious over the matter, demanded to speak to a Canada Customs supervisor, who supported and agreed with the decision of the officer to seize the signs. The signs were later inspected by experts on the Criminal Code to determine whether they were actually hate propaganda and-or obscene. In the end, they were declared to be neither.

At first, a customs supervisor told Amyotte that the signs would be available to him in two weeks’ time. Customs later phoned Amyotte to tell him he could come pick up his signs. Amyotte told them to deliver the picket signs to his Windsor home. They came within an hour, he reported.

Since the incident, Amyotte has gained all kinds of publicity, including interviews by the Windsor Star, CKLW (a local radio talkshow), the CBC, and Dallas-based Life Talk.

CBC even broadcast photos of the confiscated signs on the six o’clock news. Tongue in cheek, Amyotte warned that they should have run a warning before they aired the footage, to prevent a similar situation occurring to them.

All joking aside, Amyotte found a silver lining in his troubles: the CBC showed the truth about what happens to unborn babies through abortion – a message that is often censored from being given to the public in the media.