On Monday, January 6, 1992 the official opening of the new Way Inn and Aid to Women offices in Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood took place. Since the premises are right next door to the Cabbagetown Women’s clinic at which Dr. Monole Buruiana performs abortions, a pro-life picket preceded the reception. The opposition came out in force too, and helped make the opening a memorable event: few residents of the neighbourhood could have been left in ignorance of the fact that there was an abortuary there, and that it was bound to cause conflict.
Simple chants
As the picketers stood in silence, holding up their placards, they were given a good deal of food for thought. Carolyn Egan and Cherie MacDonald, both of the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics, and other pro-abortion leaders had drummed a few simple chants into their followers’ heads.
By dint of loud repetition, the pro-lifers were made to realize that their name was a lie, since they were prepared to let women die; that they were fascists and Nazis; that they were racist, sexist, and homophobic; and that they were born-again bigots.
Generally speaking, the police kept control; without them present, some of the pro-lifers might have reacted to taunts and shoving and other incitements to confrontation.
When 6:00 p.m. came, and the picketers lowered their signs and headed up the stairs to The Way Inn, the pro-abortionists were in good enough voice to remind them loudly that their cause was lost and the only thing they had left was prayer.
Rent-a-mob?
Is there a Rent-a-Mob agency in Toronto?
Where did Miss Egan and Miss MacDonald find these people? Some of them were identified as university students, but it is hard to believe that young men and women capable of going to university could descend to such a level.
Could even the June Callwoods and the Doris Andersons, those pillars of the establishment who defend the public spiritedness and heroic persistence of the well-mannered pro-abortionists, in contrast to the hooliganism of the housewives, nurses, priests, teachers, lawyers and students on the pro-life side, have been proud of their allies on this day?
The one side did nothing but slander and vilify; the other silently pointed out, through the signs carried, a simple and undeniable fact – abortion kills babies.
The pro-abortion fanatics behaved like goons.
The only qualifications they appeared to have were good lungs and an ability to parrot catch words.
If they thought about it, one of their favourite chants – “Not the Church, and not the State, / Women must decide their fate” – is very misleading.
Women decide their fate when they agree to have intercourse with men; if the result is a baby, as sometimes happens, someone else’s fate is involved, and so it is no longer a question of the women making a simple choice which is entirely a matter of her private concern.
For her to decide to kill her baby, as Mother Teresa has said repeatedly, is to perform one of the most heinous of acts.
Mocking Christianity
Bigotry, sexism, and homophobia were fairly harmless accusations compared to some of the others made. The really offensive yells by the pro-abortionists concerned Christianity – mockery of the prayers of the picketers, mockery of Jesus’ death on the Cross, mockery of the Catholic Mass.
This surely taught the picketers something else: that we no longer live in a decent society, for in a decent society such blasphemy would not be tolerated by the civic authorities. Given the banishment of reason and decency, the goons were quite right in saying that our cause is lost and the only thing we had left was prayer.
They had finally hit on something true.
