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Warning: Graphic image

The display of images of dismembered fetuses, on sandwich boards in public places and on flyers delivered to people’s homes, needs to end, and Ontario’s Attorney General has the constitutional power to end it: that’s the argument an NDP member of the provincial legislature and three municipal Toronto politicians have made in an open letter to the Ontario government.

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The anti-abortion groups in question, however, say the photos are deliberately gruesome, and that the effort to suppress them is an attack on their right to political expression. And as the battle unfolds in the coming weeks and months, it could prove an important test of the limits of free speech.

The letter from MPP Peter Tabuns, Toronto city councillors Paula Fletcher and Mary Fragedakis and Toronto District School Board trustee Jennifer Story names The Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform as a key distributor of the kind of material it would like to see prohibited. Tabuns said the letter was partially a response to flyers sent by the Centre — supposedly displaying a decapitated, disembowelled and dismembered fetus at the 20-week mark. The letter asks Attorney General Yasir Naqvi to treat the distribution of such graphic material as a public nuisance, and to order an injunction against it.