(Editor’s note: Rev. Jeffrey Stephaniuk lived in Norquay from 1996 to 1999 and was known throughout a much larger area for playing the bandura at various functions. Since leaving Norquay, he has served in Ukrainian Catholic churches in Melfort, Wadena and Wynyard.)
The editor:
As with calls to remove prayer from the Legislature, those who demand and defend abortion will need to seek election themselves in order to affect their changes, and also to call a constitutional summit.
There is no human right to abortion, not at the United Nations, and not in Canada. Justice Wilson in Morgentaler 1988 spoke of both timely access to abortion and the role of legislators in defending the human fetus as fetus “somewhere in the second trimester,” which means earlier than the “20 weeks gestation” of which the protesters with the change.org account are critical.
Further, abortion is not health care, neither for the mother nor the pre-born. The phrase, “changes to reproductive status,” used in the petition calling for an apology for the flag, when referring to real pregnancy, that is postconception, requires the same acceptance of the dishonest use of language as the migrant who defended his action of raping a boy in Austria as a “sex emergency.” The euphemism, “changes to reproductive status” after pregnancy has begun can only mean the will and consent to end the life of a pre-born human being, just as “sex emergency” can only mean the inexcusable action of violating an innocent child.
The protests over the flag at Prince Albert are similar to a Super Bowl 2016 television ad about an ultrasound, a pre-born child and Doritos chips. The criticism centred on “humanizing fetuses” in a commercial with computer-generated effects of a pre-born child on ultrasound. “The commitment” of abortion groups “to denying the humanity of the unborn child is in conflict with basic common sense,” wrote Jay Nordlinger for National Review Online; the possibility that he or she is something other than “a meaningless blob of protoplasm.”
The reaction of the protesters in Prince Albert is to a flag with the phrases “Please let me live” and “Celebrate Life Week.” The flag also features a cartoon, Umbert the Unborn, “the comic strip by Gary Cangemi that has been charming people of all ages with its gentle humour and pre-natal antics since 2001,” according to Cangemi’s website.
Very often pro-life groups shy away from the graphic abortion imagery of real human beings who have been beheaded and dismembered during the pre-born time of their development by abortionists, precisely because they do not want to offend anyone. As Jonathon van Maren with the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform explains about the graphic imagery, they “show what happened when that human being was mutilated during the abortion procedure… a very small human being has been violently evicted from the womb he or she needs to continue developing.” Herein lies the real human rights abuse.
With 125,000 abortions around the world every day, the threat to the protesters’ one-world government and the existence of “global so-called ‘pro-life’ and anti-abortion movements” is a conspiracy theory one could only wish would some day in the future be true, and is most definitely furthest from the truth today. From the language used of “pregnant person” and “choices about their own bodily anatomy” these protesters sound more like gender ideologists than debaters grounded in reason and reality. In June, their rainbow flag will be flying on that same spot as this pro-life flag. Identity really is the issue, but not of those who “self-identify” as a pregnant person, but what a woman, who is already a mother after conception has occurred within her reproductive system, is already pregnant with, a real, live, independently developing human being, her very child.
Rev. Jeffrey D. Stephaniuk, Editor
Saskatchewan Choose Life News
