January 23, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — In Chapter 2 of my recent book Seeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion, I examined the primary and almost instinctive response of abortion activists to the work of the pro-life movement: Censorship, with deliberate falsehood being a close second. As it becomes increasingly evident that the dusty pro-choice dogmas of the 1960s and '70s have long since been left behind by enormous leaps forward in embryology and medicine, abortion activists are left insisting that the human being anyone can see on an ultrasound isn’t a baby, and that abortion doesn’t kill that baby.
In response to both evidence that abortion is an act of violence contained in abortion victim photography as well as our increasing ability to see inside the womb, abortion activists are now actively campaigning to have the photographic and scientific evidence that so thoroughly trashes their worldview legally censored, if not banned by law completely. In recent days, for example, abortion activists who have been campaigning for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government to exclude pro-life organizations from the Canada Summer Jobs Program have responded to the shellacking Trudeau is taking for these actions in the press by suggesting that pro-life activism and speech should simply be banned as “hate speech” entirely.
This is, at the end of the day, the final goal of the abortion movement: Feticide on demand, throughout all nine months of pregnancy, funded by your tax dollars — and laws preventing those who wish to protest this insanity firmly in place to prevent any dissent from their culture of death. This is why left-wing student unions attempt to force pro-life clubs off campus. This is why slightly older city council members try to pass bylaws forcing pro-life activists off the streets. This is why provincial legislators pass laws preventing pro-lifers from offering abortion-minded women one last alternative before they walk into the clinic to do something utterly irreversible. And this is why the federal government targets pro-lifers with such ferocity.
Justin Trudeau and his abortion activist backs have been frustrated by the recent backlash in Canada by faith groups of every background and from across the political spectrum — they were quite unaware that so many pro-lifers even existed in Canada, and that increasingly obvious fact destroys the narrative of a homogenously “progressive” country they like to promote. It turns out that a multicultural and diverse country has many cultures and a diverse range of values — and very, very few of those cultures embrace abortion with the enthusiasm of Trudeau and the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada.
And so perhaps it is no accident that just as abortion activists face massive pushback from Canadians in response to their latest attempts to target and censor pro-lifers, the Liberal government has begun to toy with the idea of reviving the infamous “hate speech law” Section 13. As reported by the National Post:
Section 13 was removed from the books in June 2013 after a private member’s bill from Conservative MP Brian Storseth was passed. Liberal MP Keith Martin had tabled a bill to repeal Section 13 in 2008, but it stalled and then died on an election call.
The law had been enormously contentious, with critics of all political stripes arguing it was overly broad and had weak safeguards around speech rights. Its defenders said the law was a necessary tool to fight hate messages spread through the internet.
Section 13 made it a discriminatory practice to convey messages over the phone or internet that contain “any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt,” as long as those people were “identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”
This is the law, for example, that was used to target Maclean’s for publishing a cover story by Mark Steyn that examined demographic trends and immigration from Muslim countries — and this law serves as a handy cudgel for those who dislike certain points of view, but do not have the desire or ability to respond coherently in the public square. Abortion activists, for example, often refuse to debate pro-lifers, perhaps because they know that their insistence on viewing the developing human being in the womb as a shapeless clump of cells is both stupid and demonstrably false.
The abortion activists plan to smear pro-lifers as the purveyors of misinformation and hate, simply because that is the only weapon at their disposal when the debate centers around in-utero human beings that have been the subject of full documentaries by National Geographic. They know that as pro-lifers reach increasing numbers of people, their outdated dogmas and shrill, unscientific assertions will begin to crumble — pro-lifers see minds change on this issue every single day. And so, with Justin Trudeau as a willing ally, they will try to silence the voices that they cannot defeat.
We will have to fight back.
