Last week a parent in Calgary reported that she had come home to find that her small children had seen a flyer that had been put through the door depicting deeply bloody, disturbing and graphic images of mangled fetal body parts. They were frightened and confused and she was understandably outraged.

There is, however, little she can do and the same goes for the numerous other parents all over Canada who have had the same experience. It’s part of a campaign labeled No2Trudeau and is organized by an extreme anti-abortion group called the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, who intend to distribute more than a million of the leaflets.

I’ve known the anti-abortion movement at a fairly intimate level for 20 years and it’s obvious that a new, younger generation of activists is moving the cause into an even more militant direction. These leaflets show gory pictures of abortions, soaking red and ugly in clearly provocative close-up. That, the group believes, should make up our minds once and for all. Utter nonsense. No serious commentator ever said abortion was pretty and many believe this is not a neutral subject and that an intelligent, moderate and informed discussion may be in order.

But the way to reduce the number of abortions is to empower women, eradicate poverty, provide a modern and thorough sex education and guarantee the universal availability of contraceptives. Yet most of those behind this current campaign oppose contraception, want sex education to be diluted or abolished and say very little if anything about poverty or gender equality. They want to criminalize abortion and thus criminalize women who opt to terminate their pregnancies.

So it’s no wonder that they are on the margins of political discourse and because of this resort to increasingly irresponsible actions.

There are layers of hypocrisy here.

First, many of the organizers of this campaign are deeply involved in the movement opposing the sex education curriculum in Ontario. I know this to be true because I have interviewed several of them at demonstrations and have been writing about the campaign extensively. One of their central arguments against the sex education program is that parents should have the right to decide what their children see and what they are exposed to. Yet at the same time they patronizingly reject parental complaints that their children — often very young — are seeing profoundly shocking pictures of abortions.

They also reject the idea of educators teaching children about sex and contraception but then want to ban and criminalize any abortions that may take place because young people were not properly educated about sex and contraception!

Second, this entire campaign is directed against Justin Trudeau and his insistence that all Liberal parliamentary candidates should be pro-choice. I too have concerns about this but it’s effectively been NDP policy for years and if any political leader is being dishonest about the abortion issue it is Stephen Harper. Many and perhaps the majority of the Conservative caucus in Ottawa is opposed to abortion but they are terrified of discussing the subject and those backbench MPs who have mentioned it even in an opaque manner have been silenced or told that their parliamentary ambitions are at an end.

This campaign is a new low in Canadian politics, initiated by a group composed generally of young, childless and extremely conservative people heavily influenced by an American approach and entirely dismissive of those even in the anti-abortion movement who question their tactics. The truth is that the abortion issue is politically irrelevant in modern Canada, just as is equal marriage — mind you, ask the members of this campaign what they think of homosexuality and the results might shock you. These are not mainstream Canadian voices.

When questioned about the images one of the organizers explained that if they offend it must mean they show something horrible and if it’s horrible it means it’s wrong and should be stopped. Sorry comrade, your logic is a little callow: vivid pictures of cancer surgery or life-saving transplants look horrible, too. You have the choice to oppose abortion but you don’t have the right to traumatize children, disgust adults and put your own monomaniacal causes above the sensitivities of your fellow citizens.

Michael Coren is an author, columnist and broadcaster. mcoren@sympatico.ca .

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