Annual Walk for Life becomes a sit-down vigil in a new location
The annual Good Friday Walk for Life found a new home and a new focus this year. Organizers moved the walk from the parking lot of the Health Sciences Centre to Mary Queen of the World Parish on Topsail Road and the event was held as more of a vigil.
The walk held by the Centre for Life ( formerly known as the Right to Life Association) brought out more than 100 people who delivered prolife messages and sang hymns.
Linda Holden of the Centre for Life said the move was made in an attempt to bring a wider variety of people together.
The event marks “the importance of developing a respect for all human life at all stages of life’s journey,” she said.
The centre is focused on education and support, said Holden. It offers free, confidential support to women who may be in an unplanned pregnancy, as well as women who have had abortions and might benefit from what the group has to offer.
In the past, the annual Good Friday Walk for Life brought upwards of a thousand people to the parking lot of the Health Sciences Centre.
In recent years, the group Voices for Choice-NL has also shown up at the event with their pro-choice message.
Janelle Skeard of Voices for Choice-NL said that was done to balance the message at the annual event, not to create confrontation.
Neither side would comment on whether that had anything to do with the Centre for Life moving the location of its vigil.
Skeard did say she didn’t think the event had ever been all that confrontational and each side generally had its own routine, with pro-life supporters walking through the parking lot and singing some hymns and the pro-choice supporters voicing their own chants.
Voices for Choice-NL went to the parking lot of the Health Sciences Centre, bringing with them about 30 or so supporters this year.
Another pro-life group, not affiliated with the Centre for Life organization, was also at the Health Science Centre this year.
Skeard said she was asked by a few people if she had thought about going to protest outside of Mary Queen of the World, but she said that’s not the group’s perogative.
“That’s not the right thing to do. I’m a firm believer that there are some spaces where people just need to be left alone to do their own thing and have their own opinions and just be who they are.”
Skeard said the pro-life goup had more than 40 people show up and she felt that both sides would have had more people if the weather had been a little more co-operative.