Toronto March for Life“They’re hypocrites. They only care about fetuses.”
“How many children have you adopted?”
“All they want to do is force women to give birth.”
These aren’t direct quotes, but they easily could be. Every once in awhile I skim the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada’s page, just to see if they’ve come up with anything new that needs a response. Originality doesn’t appear to be their strong point. What does stand out to me, however, is what appears to be their ardent belief in the cruelty of pro-lifers. As they furiously type out accusatory chants such as you see above, the chorus of comments taking up the refrain is always somewhat surprising to me. Surely someone will note that pro-lifers aren’t all bad, and that they do, in fact, care at least a little bit about born people. If those comments did exist at one point, Joyce Arthur must have removed them before I got to them, and replaced them with complaints about the ‘fake clinics’.
What are fake clinics? Fake clinics are places where uncompassionate pro-lifers offer free counselling and resources to women in crisis, suspiciously as if they might care about them. Recently, my sister-in-law and I visited one of these places in Toronto. We had a load of baby paraphernalia to drop off, and had offered to stay and help organize donations. The Aid to Women (ATW) office is small but bright, and the attic upstairs is literally crammed floor to ceiling with anything that an expectant mother could possibly need: strollers, car seats, diapers, wipes, breast pumps, clothes, shoes, toys, receiving blankets, and so on.
What made the office somewhat eerie is the fact that the ATW office shares a wall with an abortion clinic that is set up next door. ATW stumbled across the location and moved in as soon as possible, knowing that being so close to an abortion clinic would mean that in many cases they would be the last hope of parents choosing life for their children. Many women do come through the door, some of them even mistaking ATW for abortion clinic. Some of them change their minds.
To say that pro-lifers don’t care about born people is an exhausted argument, so much so that it hardly warrants a response. It was just after seeing members of my own community stepping forward to donate gifts for women in need, meeting the kind ladies who work at ATW, and seeing bins and bins of baby clothes just waiting for little babies to need them that I felt frustrated enough to write something about it. I don’t believe all members of the pro-choice movement are ill-intentioned. I don’t believe that they all hate men and want to kill babies. I believe that many of them truly believe that they are fighting for the right side. That’s me being honest—it appears that it’s too much to ask for them to try pay us the same courtesy.
