I’m a child of adoption. I was adopted by my family a couple weeks after my birth in 1983. In 1983, unborn babies still had legal recognition of their Section 7 Charter Rights to life and security of the person. I don’t have enough information about the circumstances surrounding my birth to say whether I would or wouldn’t have been aborted had the procedure been legal, but I’m glad I’ve always lived in a country where I had the right to life, even when I was still being knit together in my mother’s womb. R. v. Morgentaler changed all that, but that didn’t happen until 1988. I have very vague memories of going with my parents to abortion protests when that case was being debated in the Supreme Court, so you could say I’m a child of this issue. This is my issue. I am pro-life.
I’m part of the Redeemer Pro-Life Club. We’re hosting a movie night at the Rec Centre on March 2 at 9:30 PM, where we’ll be showing Juno, an Oscar award winning drama about a unique teenage mother who makes the right decision about her unborn child. In the fall, the club organized Life Chain, an annual North-America wide event where pro-lifers gather in silence to pray for the nation and an end to abortion. I didn’t make it out to that one because I was standing in a Life Chain in front of McMaster Hospital, but I heard it was a success. In the future, we’ll be hosting another movie, this time a documentary called Blood Money, which explores some of the inconvenient facts behind the abortion industry. It’s a good club, we have productive meetings and I think we’re doing really well, because despite the fact that most Redeemer students are probably default pro-lifers, it’s important for all of us to be educated on the issue, and I think that’s something the Pro-Life Club does very well.
The timing of this post is not a coincidence. Recently, a couple of major newspapers have been covering an investigation into Redeemer’s policies surrounding academic freedom. Some of the comments on the editorial pages and web articles about this investigation highlight the concerns of some citizens that Redeemer is a sanctimonious bubble of indoctrination that suppresses dissenting thought. It isn’t, but that’s another article. What we are, however, is an institution that favours one side of this issue. We don’t have a pro-choice club. In the past, we’ve had openly pro-choice speakers such as Stephen Lewis come to the campus. We’ve had debates and dialogue about the issue, and will almost certainly continue to do so. The discussion unlikely to change the institution’s view on the issue or result in a pro-choice club being chartered here, but we're up front about that.
How does our policy stack up with those of other universities? Carleton University’s student association recently revoked the campus pro-life group's club status. Protesters there were arrested after attempts to set up a pro-life display on campus. The Universities of Calgary, Victoria and Guelph and McGill have all taken the similar measure of stripping their pro-life group of its charter. Also at McGill, a pro-life speaker named Jose Ruba was prevented from speaking by disruptive protestors who chanted, sang, and blocked the stage, finally resulting in the arrest of two demonstrators. All around this country, pro-life dissent is being forcibly silenced arguably because pro-choice groups aren't interested in having the same dialogue that we entertain here.
At Redeemer, nobody gets arrested or shouted off campus for having the wrong opinion. Maybe you could make the argument that we suppress pro-choice opinion. As a Christian institution, there’s a small extent to which we probably do, but we stand in stark contrast to some of Canada’s other institutions in one way: we’re honest about it. We're honest about who we are and what we believe, and we're not scared of a little Socratic dialogue.
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