As my business occasionally takes me to different parts of Canada, recently I have begun to contact various pro-life groups in the cities I visit.
In August, for example, I was in Calgary and in Edmonton (two days each), and in September, business took my partner and I to Vancouver for a week.
I cannot speak too highly of the kindness and generosity extended by those I have contacted. Everywhere, people gave freely of their time and shared their resources and information.
In Calgary, Andy LeGuilloux, and in Edmonton, Mr. and Mrs. Toth and Mr. and Mrs. Higgins, all helped to outline the complex situation in Alberta.
In Vancouver, a little advance notice of our visit resulted in several meetings with pro-life groups and an hour-long appearance on a phone-in radio show (the Rafe Mair Show, on CJOR) to discuss pro-life issues. Charles and Peggy Steacy of Surrey-Delta were extremely generous of their time; they convened twenty or thirty area pro-lifers one evening at their home.
Among the many other things discussed that evening were the Lions Gate Hospital disappointment, and another and more heartening story. Mr. and Mrs. Foxwell, both doctors, reported that, as the result of four years’ patient and quiet effort, one hospital (in Langley, B.C.) has now had their abortion rate reduced to zero from several hundred per annum. We will have an article or two soon for Interim readers discussing how this result was obtained. Mrs. Steacy has an article elsewhere in this issue.
Betty Green of Vancouver Right to Life gathered about twenty pro-lifers at their downtown office on our last evening in town. Like those at the Surrey-Delta meeting, they were curious about Interim, about how the paper began and what are its objectives. Again, I learned an enormous amount. It is quite evident that now we are combating not only abortion but also the side-effects of living in a culture that accepts and takes it for granted.
Did you know that the “New Horizons” program for Senior Citizens is actually run (savage irony) by “Dying with Dignity” – which exists to promote suicide and euthanasia? Or that they have been getting federal grants?
Has it occurred to you to ask why one group that is traditionally pro-life – the handicapped – has recently become very quiet, even reticent? Small wonder, since handicaps are high on the abortion-promoter’s hit list, and are, with senior citizens, next-in-line for the euthanasia-promoter’s death list. Cost-benefit analyses on keeping both of these groups around are beginning to circulate.
Did you know that the Commonwealth Secretariat, a government organization has been so successfully infiltrated by IPPF (the International Planned Parenthood Federation) that it is now being used by them to promote, one-sidedly, the establishment of liberal (“on request”) abortion laws in third-world countries and throughout the commonwealth? (See my wife’s column in this issue.)
While I often mentioned our continual need for information and articles, for subscriptions and for advertising (Interim is a national newspaper), I learned something of the effects Interim is having.
This paper was begun eight months ago to fill the need for an independent, national newspaper that would report as impartially as possible on the whole spectrum of life-issues. It appears that the paper is having many effects.
A great many of our readers have been fighting abortion for ten or even fifteen years, while others have just recently entered the fray. For some of the seasoned campaigners, Interim tries to provide its readers with an overview of what the advocates of death in our culture are doing, again so that we will be able to envision the whole situation and can realize how it affects each of us locally.
Finally, Interim appears to be helping to maintain – or to generate – a sense of national unity and purpose among its readers, by providing a more cohesive image of ourselves as a whole and as people participating in a fight for survival that is noble and dignified and unselfish.
