Small children find the world an alarming place, which it is when you’re short and underweight. You’re at a huge disadvantage. What is a trump? You can’t read the menu. If your mom orders green eggs and ham, how will you know? Knowledge is power. You have neither.

And then you see people holding up big pictures of what look like cut-up minnows or creepy-crawlies covered in blood, and Dad gets mad and tells the people to go away. But they don’t. Mom doesn’t let you check the mailbox any more.

All over Toronto, huge posters and hundreds of thousands of anti-abortion flyers with these photos are being publicly displayed and delivered to homes by the so-called “Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.”

Throughout the summer, GO trains and thousands of cars heading downtown on the Gardiner and Lake Shore faced these big posters. I’ve seen teenage girls — and strange shy boys — displaying the photos on Bloor St. and yes, I have spoken to them with brisk sincerity.

The photos purport to be of aborted fetuses. But I’ve seen the results of abortions in medical trays and you’d really have to hunt through all that uterine lining with a magnifying glass to find what they claim to show. A fetus does not look like the alien that surged out of Ripley’s stomach. Most are invisible.

City councillors, MPPs and school trustees are asking Ontario Attorney General Yasir Naqvi to file an injunction banning the images — though not the words — which they say are especially upsetting to children.

“People are horrified, they’re traumatized, they’re worried about their children,” Toronto-Danforth MPP Peter Tabuns told the Star. “We’re in a society where free speech is guaranteed and I’m very glad of that but putting out images that are so horrendous is not something that is responsible.”

There’s free speech, and there’s the abuse of free speech. The photos, all red and pink, look like a butcher’s shop window (which is actually where director Ridley Scott got props for his creatures in the movie Alien).

What they resemble is pornography. If Ontario families were being handed close-ups of vaginas and penises, the government would shut it down, and fast. So why not ban misleading photos intended to frighten women out of their legal right to control their own bodies?

In Toronto’s east end, we used to get the racist equivalent of anti-choice frighteners: a neo-Nazi newspaper of indescribable vulgarity, racism, and anti-Semitism. It went on for years. Canada Post workers were compelled to deliver the wretched things, and then I had to hide them and slip them out of the house.

I was unable to get my MP to understand my distress, but brave local citizens finally managed to get a federal ban on its distribution. A hearing into the ban continues.

These publications made me feel shame for the adult world. I didn’t want children to know that adults could be so malevolent — parents hint at this knowledge and then break the bad news in adolescence — but this is us.

The centre’s website is disturbing enough, but one campaign, “The Genocide Awareness Project,” breaks records for bad taste. It shows “billboards which graphically compare the victims of abortion to victims of other atrocities, such as Jews in the Holocaust.”

What do children think those bloody tadpoles in the photos are? Cake decorations, maybe, or red ants. And swastikas perhaps look like spiders, itsy-bitsy ones.

The anti-choice campaigners basically taunt parents and children for being unable to look away, for not having the choice to see or not see. They defend themselves by claiming it’s for their own good.

I don’t much care about the anti-abortion cult. Let these men in dark suits and women in their red dresses smile manically in their own photos, let them have huge families, be my guest. That’s their choice.

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But stop pestering people outside abortion clinics, get out of my mailbox, and get out of my way on the sidewalk.

You make small children cry. You upset adults for reasons you can’t guess at. You don’t know what fear you inspire, what memories of bullying you dredge up ... oh wait, you do know.

That is the part you enjoy.