George Grant is the author of the award-winning expose of the abortion industry, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood. He was the keynote speaker at the fifth annual Ottawa Conference on the Family, April 2-4.
Mr. Grant told an audience of 150 that the abortion pill RU-486 isn’t the wonder drug to save the world. Even the footnotes in the favourable New England Journal of Medicine article prove to be fabricated, he said, “ The test results were tinkered with. Ru-486 doesn’t do anything but kill babies.”
“The propaganda (for RU-486) will sound incredibly convincing. The public relations and marketing people for the abortion industry are savvy enough to know no to tout RU-486 as an abortion pill. Their track will be to showcase this ‘harmless little pill’ as a versatile medical cure with more uses than Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Oil Soap,” he cautioned.
“Why on earth is anyone taken in by the rhetoric of Planned Parenthood (PP)?” Mr. Grant asked. Most of all, he said, because PP understands the attractiveness of “charity” and the power of service.
Coffee-cup counselling
“The church gains credibility in a culture when it shows it cares. We Christians mustn’t worry so much about slick ads and sound bites or marvelous legislation as we do about coffee cup counselling. Some of the most exciting developments are in AIDS crisis. Families have been reconciled. There has been an unparalleled revival in those countries and the AIDS crisis there is slowing.”
In Belgium in 1990, King Baudouin privately asked Mr. Grant, “If I abdicate rather than sign [the abortion bill] will the church stand with me?” Grant told him he didn’t know. “I told him , ‘ You mustn’t ask what will the church say. Ask what will Christ say.’ Yet this question still haunts me. We must answer to kings.”
Letters
“If I do the right thing will the church stand with me?” other leaders at the conference asked.
Pro-life Conservative MP John Reimer said how crucial it was that Christians send letters to their MPs. “Then I can say, ‘I’m here on behalf of so-and-so’. Don’t leave us standing alone on crucial issues.”
“ Get to know your opponents. Listen, know their stories. Speak eye to eye; don’t just carry picket signs,” Mr. Grant also stressed.
Focus on the Family Canada hosted the Ottawa Conference, with delegates from almost thirty different pr-life and pro-family organizations across Canada.
Participants reported on new mercy ministries including AIDS crisis centre in Vancouver, a centre for abused women in Ottawa, and a rape crisis centre run by Christians (“The feminists will not counsel men who have been raped.”)
New networks and coalitions formed at the conference to cut duplication and costs. “We need to access what is already out there,” said Hudson Hilsden, of the Pentecostal Assemblies. “We can’t live alone in our own small world if we want to in the big battles.”
