Women in crisis pregnancies need help

By Deborah Gyapong

Canadian Catholic News

OTTAWA (CCN) — Mary experienced a “crisis pregnancy” while pregnant with Jesus, so she “can relate to you,” a prominent pro-life advocate told a Catholic high school assembly May 12.

“She was a young woman, 13, 14 or 15,” said Jakki Jeffs, executive director of Alliance for Life Ontario. Mary was betrothed to Joseph and expected to be a virgin, she said.

“Mary could have been killed for being pregnant, if Joseph hadn’t accepted her,” she said.

When an angel told Mary at the Annunciation that she would carry the Word of God in her womb, she “made a choice for life,” Jeffs told students at St. Joseph Catholic High School as part of the Ottawa Diocese’s designated Week for Life that included the National March for Life events May 12-14.

Mary also made a choice to protect the Word of God, Jeffs said. If Mary could do it during a time when she could have been killed, surely we can find the courage to bring a baby to term or to stand by a young woman facing a crisis pregnancy, she said.

Jeffs was joined at the assembly by others in the pro-life world, including Parliamentary Pro-life Caucus president MP Rod Bruinooge, Canadian Priests for Life national director Rev. Tom Lynch and Euthanasia Prevention Coalition executive director Alex Schadenberg.

Lynch explained that Canada has no law against abortion. One does not even need to be a doctor or a nurse or have a license to carry one out, he said. In some communities in Canada, such as Scarborough, 108 boys are born for every 100 girls, because some immigrant communities “want boys and abort girls,” he said.

Lynch said it made no sense to have warnings on cigarette packages or liquor bottles about the harms of smoking and drinking to pregnancies, or to see the latest pictures of a baby’s development in the womb to know an unborn child is not just a lump of tissue.

Abortion gets rid of the person who is causing the problem when society should be dealing with “helping the person with the problem,” he said.

He urged the students to use social media like Facebook and YouTube to get the pro-life message out and “influence the people around you.” He urged them to put together videos to upload to the Internet and offered a $500 prize for the best one.

Schadenberg spoke of the recent defeat of a euthanasia and assisted suicide bill in the House of Commons. He also told the students the story of a first-year Carleton University student who was lured to commit suicide by an Internet predator, a man posing as a woman, who urged her to enter into a suicide pact.

The predator, an American male nurse, tried to get Nadia Kajouji to kill herself in front of her web cam, but she disappeared in March 2008. Her body was later found in Ottawa’s Rideau River.

“The law says nobody should be involved in taking another person’s life,” he said.

The assembly was organized by St. Joseph’s Respect for Life Team, a student group.

“We’ve been busy at work organizing this event in order to promote a pro-life culture within our school and school board by focusing student effort and activities specifically on beginning- and end-of-life issues,” said Matt Dineen, the teacher who acts as an adviser for the team.