A trio of anti-abortion protesters demonstrated outside the Learning Resource Commons (LRC) this morning with Humber union faculty staging a counter protest, outnumbering them by one.
The trio staged the anti-abortion protest for about an hour and showed graphic images of aborted fetuses.
They tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to distribute flyers and strike up conversations with students.
Union faculty stood across the crosswalk, greeting students getting off buses with signs reading “we care about our students,” and “right for you equals right choice.”
The anti-abortion group, Toronto Against Abortion, is part of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform and has protested on Humber campus since 2016.
Chandra Hodgson, a Humber English professor, was part of the four union faculty today. She said she was present during the 2016 protest.
“They were in a main hallway where students really didn’t know how to avoid them,” she said. “It was quite difficult to find a way around them. You kind of had to be subjected to quite graphic, violent and misleading images and messages on your way to class.”
Hodgson said these images are problematic at a post-secondary institution because Humber is about teaching science, not propaganda.
Hodgson said Humber faculty launched a grievance after the 2016 protest and successfully fought for advance warning of such protests, as well as a degree of control over where they take place so that students can choose to avoid them.
Blaise Alleyne, a spokesperson of Toronto Against Abortion, said in an interview with Humber News that while the group advocates for a ban against abortion in Canada, their focus is on “education.”
He said they do not advocate for specific policies when they are out having conversations.
While Alleyne does not regard abortion as murder, doctors should be punished for providing abortion access, he said.
“I don’t have much hesitation in terms of targeting physicians who are decapitating, dismembering and disemboweling innocent human beings with the full weight of the law,” Alleyne said.
He called the graphic images victim photography and compared them to photos of war victims in Ukraine and the video of police murder of George Floyd.
Alleyne defended what many would see as a deeply offensive comparison.
“An analogy isn‘t an equivalence,” he said. “I‘m talking about specifically the use of victim photography.”
Angad Handa was one of the few students the protesters managed to stop and talk to. He described his position on the issue as neutral.
“Of course, killing a child is not good,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it’s a woman’s body, you know, they can do whatever they want.”
Miriam Novik, a Humber English professor who was on campus during the 2016 protest, was also part of the faculty’s counter presence today.
“A lot of my students were really upset and we talked about it and one of them said, ‘no matter what you think about this issue, what they’re doing doesn’t help anyone.’ And to me, that’s the bottom line,” she said.
Hodgson said while it is the protesters’ right to be there, it was important to offer a counter presence.
“It’s putting some love out into the world and letting people know that there’s more than one way to look at this issue,” she said.