Bus ads: Dishonesty is the worst sign of all

I write concerning the balanced front page reporting by Joelle Kovach on the Peterborough bus sign controversy: “Anti-abortion ads violate code.”

Not all pro-life Canadians agree on the best strategies for persuading our fellow citizens that abortion ends the life of an innocent human being, harms mothers and fathers, and has lasting deleterious societal effects. In this regard, some favour and some do not favour signs on the back of Peterborough buses. As a father of six and a former teacher of children in grades 5 to 12 for more than 25 years, I understand the deep place from which objections to displays of aborted human beings arise.

But my understanding does not efface the disturbing irony that while objectors strenuously protest the images, they defend to the point of sacralising the violent life-ending practice which produces the images. How can the effect be greater than the cause? Their reaction seems straight out of an Orwellian or Atwoodian inspired dystopian novel or film.

The Advertising Standards Council claim that the ads “mislead” because images of the 16-week-old fetus give “the false impression that abortions are being regularly performed that late into pregnancies” is a story unto itself.

Via the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act, the Ontario Government has cut off access to gestational or demographic statistics regarding induced abortion (a move it recently repeated in Bill 84 regarding assisted suicide or euthanasia) in violation of the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics, an international agreement of which Canada is a signatory. The latest available, though substantially incomplete, stats provided by the Canadian Institute for Health Information – absent data from chemical abortions, free standing clinics, and Quebec – show that in 2013 about 10 per cent of abortions occurred between 13-20 weeks, that is about 2,500/year (CIHI, “Induced Abortions Reported in Canada, 2013, Table 4).

Advertisements are not essays. The pertinent question is not whether abortions at 16 weeks are “regularly” performed in accordance with ASC’s definition of regularity. The pertinent questions are: (1) whether 2,500 plus abortions of human beings with beating hearts and all their fingers and toes is morally egregious? (2) why do our governments not transparently display and make easily accessible this data in its entirety? (3) and, why are our political, legal, educational, and fifth estate institutions so complicit in supporting the status quo?

The most disturbing sign is deep-seated, systemic dishonesty and dissembling. Donald Graham Claudette Crt.