Stop telling us what we can believe

Dear Chris Selley,

I really must take issue with your recent column in the National Post on abortion. 

You say:

“It probably doesn’t need explaining how fantastically stupid abortion-to-Holocaust analogies are — the two things are overwhelmingly more dissimilar than they are similar — but I suppose it couldn’t hurt. The Canadian Institute for Health Information reports 83,576 women underwent an abortion procedure in 2019. They made that choice for a wide variety of reasons, some of which would attract more sympathy in the court of public opinion than others.”

To begin with CIHI grossly under reports the numbers of abortions done in Canada every year. If you had delved a bit deeper into the subject you would have learned this yourself. See here and here. (This is due to a complicated bunch of reasons but I would be happy to send you all of my research on abortion numbers in Canada if you care to learn the facts.)

This means that since 1988 there have been at least 100,000 abortions every year, which would mean at least 3,300,000 abortions since that year, never mind the ones done before that. Some find this comparison to a holocaust offensive. In fact you call it "fantastically stupid".

So what is the definition of holocaust? According to Merriam-Webster:

a: usually the Holocaust: the mass slaughter of European civilians and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II
b: a mass slaughter of people, especially GENOCIDE (emphasis added)

So you see there are many Canadians (Group A) who believe that abortion is a morally horrific act. They believe that taking the lives of defenseless human beings on such a massive scale scale, each and every year, is in fact a holocaust. On the other hand, there are many Canadians (Group B) who believe that abortion is an acceptable solution to an unwanted pregnancy. You seem to belong to Group B. While I don't agree with you, I wouldn't call your viewpoint "fantastically stupid".

Next you say:

“The vast majority of people who might retweet or nod in agreement with that NCLN tweet clearly do not, in fact, believe it. If you actually think a Holocaust is ongoing in your country’s clinics and hospitals, you don’t cheerfully promote online events featuring “pro-life badasses.” You don’t say things like “there’s a lot of joy in the air,” as a spokesperson for the anti-abortion Campaign Life Coalition effused of 2018’s March for Life in Ottawa. You’re beside yourself. You’re pulling your hair out, chaining yourself to things, frantically trying to keep people out of abortion clinics. Maybe you’re even blowing stuff up.”

"Joy" and "cheerfully"? Since you are not pro-life and have no idea what it is like to be pro-life and be discriminated against and marginalized by every Tom, Dick and Chris, we must try to, you know, keep each other's spirits up in such a difficult and thankless task it is, to advocate against abortion. As for "chaining ourselves to things trying to keep people out of abortion clinics"-- have you heard of abortion bubble zone laws where pro-life people have no freedom of expression rights, and at the March's for Life where handfuls of screaming antifa people are allowed to block thousands of us on our approved routes, and the police do nothing to stop them? See:

https://run-with-life.blogspot.com/2020/01/pro-life-right-wing-extremists.html

https://run-with-life.blogspot.com/2017/05/how-peaceful-prolife-people-are-dealt.html

https://run-with-life.blogspot.com/2017/05/march-for-life-2017-we-will-never-give.html

https://run-with-life.blogspot.com/2018/05/march-for-life-2018.html

And as for "blowing stuff up"? Did you really haul out that tired old mantra?

Finally, and most importantly, why is it that people from (Group B) always want to dictate what people from (Group A), are allowed to believe, allowed to say, and how they are allowed to act?