Jonathon Van Maren

2018 seems to have slipped past when nobody was looking, and it is hard to believe the year is gone already. So much was done and so much happened, but as one of my friends noted, the days are long but the years are short. At the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, we were privileged to see our efforts culminate in over four million views of abortion victim photography, tens of thousands of people trained in apologetics, and most importantly, lives saved.

I’ve been asked many times why I decided, back in university, to change my career plans and join the pro-life movement full-time. I’ve told that story many times—how in my first year of classes, I looked up “abortion” on the Internet after comments from my professor and saw a video that transformed my view of the issue in minutes.

I’ve studied abortion and the reality of the different abortion procedures many times, but every once in awhile I still stumble across something that disturbs me.

There is often the tendency when writing about heroes of the past and present to focus on men and women of such stature that the greatness of their deeds seems out of reach to average citizens such as us. For obvious reasons, history books are more inclined to focus on the soaring oratory of Martin Luther King Jr.

For Christians, this weekend is an extraordinarily important and solemn one. There is Good Friday, when commemorations are held of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on a little hill outside Jerusalem some 2,000 years ago. And then there is Easter, when Death itself was conquered through the Resurrection. Across the country and the continent, Christian denominations of every stripe will be hosting Good Friday and Easter services and reflecting on what these things mean.

I first heard of “fetus dreams” in university It was an essay published in a Norton anthology I had to purchase for one of my first university English courses, published in Harper’s Magazine in October 1990 by a nurse named Sallie Tisdale. It is called “We Do Abortions Here: A Nurse’s Story.” In it, she calls abortion a “sweet brutality,” and attempts to justify what she sees as a necessary evil:

“If abortion pictures are so effective,” some people point out, “why don’t abortionists change their minds?” This is an interesting and compelling point. Abortion workers are often tasked with piecing aborted babies back together like a bloody jigsaw puzzle to make sure that no body parts get left behind in the uterus to cause infection after the procedure is completed. Day after day, they face and facilitate a relentless and unspeakable carnage. So why, knowing what they know and seeing what they see, do they remain in the abortion industry?

I haven’t always agreed with Tasha Kheiriddin—most notably her past columns on the postcard campaigns of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, as well as her analysis of the 2015 election outcome—but her column today over at iPolitics was bang-on. 

For years, pro-life activists have been pointing out that the “pro-choice” ideology is a scientifically illiterate and incoherent philosophy that defies everything we know about the pre-born human being developing in the womb. In fact, while abortion activists tried (and try) to portray the coming of legalized feticide as a victory of enlightenment and liberation over the religious values of the Dark Ages, this is simply a historical lie.

One of the questions we are often asked about using abortion victim photography is regarding desensitization. “Doesn’t seeing the images over and over again make you numb to abortion’s horrific reality?” someone may ask. The answer to this question is, quite simply, no.