An Inconvenient Truth: An Insider’s Reflections on the Recent Maritime Show the Truth Tour
By Heather Thompson

Canada is the 10th happiest nation in the world, according to a recent study conducted by University of Leicester professor, Adrian White.  White’s first-ever world happiness index considered the well-being of individuals in 178 countries and found that a nation’s wealth and health greatly affected its happiness.  Factors inducing smiles on the faces of Canadians include our free health care, our financial prosperity, and our access to secondary education.  No doubt, Canadians have worked hard to achieve this ranking.  Any tax payer will tell you that happiness does not come cheap. 

Yet, despite all the hype about Canada’s high-ranking happiness, I couldn’t help but see a vein of irony in the findings, especially in light of recent reactions to the pro-life group, Show the Truth’s, presence in the Maritimes.  Show the Truth, as its name suggests, is committed to showing the truth about abortion.  They do this by displaying graphic signs of aborted babies along roadsides during rush hours.  The signs are distressing, but then, so is abortion.  Pedestrians and drivers come face to face with the children whose lives have been so brutally snuffed out in the name of “choice.”  Each severed head, each crooked and bloodied limb, each exposed rib cage, each broken heart forces the viewer to question the idea that if an abortion is done in the sanitary confines of a hospital or abortion clinic, that it’s okay.  Pro-choicers would even go so far as to tell us that it’s healthy for the mother.  Unfortunately, these same mothers are not told the side-effects of their decision: increased risks of cancer, future fertility problems, and life-long psychological trauma, to name a few.

Over the course of our Maritime tour, we found ourselves gradually becoming accustomed to 5:00 a.m. wake up calls; five minute wash-downs (if that!) at crowded sinks in lieu of showers; digestive problems due to the rushed meals; exhaust fumes in our faces; pelting torrential rains; sweltering sun; and reams of recycled swear words.  One of my friends had encouraged me to come on this trip.  She’d sold it to me as a “vacation” opportunity.  I knew it was going to be somewhat difficult, but I never expected any of the above.  I also never expected how little comfort a person actually needs to be happy.

Early one morning, during the first week of our trip, we went to a Morgentaler abortion clinic in Fredericton, New Brunswick.  The street and the clinic were quiet as we set up our signs and began our prayer vigil.  Not long after our arrival, blue-vested “clinic escorts” began to emerge from the clinic with black umbrellas.  Is it going to rain? I wondered naively, when I first saw them.  It didn’t take long for me to realize that the black umbrellas had another purpose entirely.

Over the course of the next hour and a half, I watched about seven young women being escorted from the parking lot to the clinic.  The clinic escorts greeted them with welcoming smiles and ushered them in using the umbrellas to shield the mothers’ eyes from us.  In doing this, they effectively—though not in all cases—blocked these scared, confused and misinformed women from getting a preview of what they were about to do inside the clinic.  So much for freedom of choice!

None of these young women looked pregnant: there were no bulging bellies or laboured steps.  It’s probable, then, that they were, like most women who abort, in the first trimester of their pregnancies.  The majority of babies aborted in Canada are 10 weeks old.  Mothers are told they’re doing nothing wrong, that the foetus—a nice, distant, clinical kind of word—is merely a “blob of tissue.”  They are not told, however, that already at 10 weeks, the baby, not only looks human, it is also completely sensitive to touch, squints, swallows, and even puckers its small brow and frowns.

Seeing those women being escorted in to terminate the lives within them transformed me. I realized, with a sudden flash of recognition, that abortion was most definitely murder and that, if saving those children’s lives meant ruffling a few feathers, causing a few tears, or being the firing target for expletives, that I had a duty to endure it by standing tall behind my sign to show the truth!  The next day, we found out that our efforts had been worth it: one mother decided to keep her baby after seeing our signs on her way into Morgentaler’s clinic.

In the days that followed, there was no mistaking that many Maritimers—pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike—were finding us not only uncomfortable to deal with, but also a down-right nuisance and a terrible inconvenience.  One episode stands out as representative of the negative reactions we received.  I was standing outside the Fredericton Mall in Fredericton, New Brunswick.  Suddenly, a young man ran out of a MacDonald’s restaurant across the street and leaped out onto the street.  A woman brought up the rear, just narrowly missing being hit by a car.  They bounded up to one of my colleagues and began a tirade that sounded something like this: “Do you realize that there are people eating in there who have to look out and see this!” (indicating the picture of an 21-week old aborted baby known to us as Malachi).  “This is disgusting!  How can you show these pictures?  There’s children in there!  I can’t eat looking at this stuff...!”  It was more important to him to finish his meal in comfort than to acknowledge the loss of Malachi and millions of others like him—babies who will never have the chance to grow up, discover their potentials, contribute to society, or even share a meal around the table with their families, as this young man had been doing.

For two weeks, in the heart and heat of Summer, the Maritimes was abuzz with talk of abortion.  Those who saw our signs, or heard about them, were forced to confront an issue which is largely a silent one nowadays.  But I would suggest that our very silence as a society when it comes to abortion speaks volumes.  Societies, like individuals, only hide those things of which they are most ashamed.  On the other hand, we have no problem proclaiming on the roof tops that we offer free health care, that we are a financially flourishing country, and that we can afford to educate every single Canadian who wants to be educated.  It’s been a couple of months since Adrian White published his world happiness map, and we’re still basking in that glory.  How long, I wonder, will it be before the abortion buzz quiets down again in the Maritimes and elsewhere in Canada?  Canadians pride ourselves on being a cut above the rest.  We identify ourselves as the peace-keeping nation; we will now add to that distinction that we are a happy nation.  But we will never be comfortable with announcing that we are an aborting nation.

When the Truth becomes inconvenient, an alarm should begin to sound in our hearts.  When maintaining that so-sought-after Canadian equilibrium (which we like to call our “peacefulness”) becomes more important than facing reality, an alarm should begin to sound in our hearts.  When foundational concepts such as “choice,” “freedom,” and “rights” become applied to only certain individuals in a society, an alarm should begin to sound in our hearts.  If we ignore the warnings, we run the risk of trading our current happiness not merely for unhappiness, but utter despair.

Being a member of Show the Truth this Summer taught me many things about myself, about my neighbours, about how to love (yes, even how to love my enemy).  Most of all, it’s taught me that I have a choice to make in my own life: be silent forever and be loved by all, or be convicted enough to be pro-life in every aspect of my life, when it’s convenient and especially when it’s inconvenient, and risk the temporary persecution.  To me, the answer is now obvious.  

Heather Thompson is a teacher at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom in Combermere, ON.