The anti-abortion activist group Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CCBR) held a demonstration on Tuesday at Humber College’s North campus.
The group was founded in 2001 and modelled after the Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, an American anti-abortion protest group.
Protestors lined up between the bus terminal and the main entrance at Humber’s North campus with graphic signs depicting aborted fetuses.
Christina, who declined to share her last name due to backlash, said she was there to create a dialogue about abortion and the “killing of innocent lives.”
“We’re here for human rights,” Christina said. “[Abortion] is happening to 300 babies every day.”
According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, 87,485 abortions were reported in hospital and non-hospital settings in 2021, averaging just below 240 per day, with about 40 per cent happening in Ontario.
“I think an alternative to abortion could be various things,” Christina said, citing adoption as an option.
According to the Children’s Aid Foundation of Canada, Canada currently has 63,000 parentless children in care, with 30,000 available for adoption and only 2,000 adopted each year.
Christina is not registered to adopt and did not indicate that she would be willing to do so.
“If we look back on history, we said in order to have human rights, you needed to be human plus white, and we see the discrimination against people who are Black or human plus non-Jew. What happens?” Christina said. “Discrimination.”
Christina claimed she wasn’t arguing an equivalency between race and the status of a fetus.
“I’m not saying they’re equivalent,” she said. “They’re equivalent in the sense that they are both ways of discriminating.”
A counter-protester standing up for abortion rights at Humber North Campus. Photo credit: Asher Klaver
Two counter-protestors sat on a bench nearby with signs. They said they believe abortion is a human right and, as women, it is important to fight for their human rights. One counter-protestor held a sign that read, “Don’t say you’re pro-life if you only value certain lives.”
Christine De Vuono, a spokesperson for the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada and mother, is very critical of the tactics and message of the CCBR and does not think targeting school campuses is ethical.
“[Students] are going through their day and not even thinking about [abortion],” De Vuono said. “They’re worrying about an exam or worrying about getting groceries. I find it quite disrespectful to people.”
De Vuono is also skeptical of the images that CCBR uses on their posters.
“Some of them I’m looking at and thinking, ‘that’s a much older fetus,’ and it’s dubious where they get their pictures from,” De Vuono said.
De Vuono is also unclear on whether or not human rights are an issue in the debate. She cited the Canadian Human Rights Act, saying that all individuals should have an opportunity to make for themselves the lives that they wish to have without being hindered by discriminatory practices.
“According to [Canada’s] Human Rights Act, no individual can infringe on the rights of another person,” De Vuono said.
CCBR has compared abortion to the Holocaust and lynchings, as well as other genocides, often using images of mass graves for their messaging and graphic imagery of abortions in public areas.
Co-founder of the CCBR, Stephanie Gray, compared her views to that of Martin Luther King Jr. when speaking to The National Post in 2013, saying that CCBR was using extreme tactics to reach a political end.
De Vuono was shocked by the comparison that the CCBR made of themselves to civil rights leaders.
“To compare abortion to that really strong and complex series of rights movements are trying to hack into other people’s nobility and honesty,” De Vuono said.