Over the summer, the Toronto Star reported that Liberal MP Paul Szabo is the "MP to watch in the same-sex marriage debate because he was so successful at rallying support for the reproductive technology battle that some say he is single-handedly responsible for forcing the Liberal leadership to put off the vote on that bill because of lack of backbench support."

Later, the Globe and Mail reported that "Ottawa fears revolt on embryo legislation." C-13, the government's fundamentally flawed and erroneously named An Act Respecting Human Reproduction and Related Technologies, is multi-faceted. It regulates fertility treatment (IVF), surrogate motherhood, stem cell research and human cloning (among numerous other issues). The idea behind this wide-ranging bill was to try to sneak some immoral practices such as the destruction of human embryos to harvest stem cells for research by promising to ban human cloning. At best, this "Hobson's Choice" would have pressured MPs to vote for a bad bill because it claimed to do a good - namely ban human cloning.

But through the work of American researcher Dr. Dianne Irving, CLC Medical Advisor Dr. John Shea and CLC Research Director Hilary White we discovered huge loop-holes in the supposed ban on cloning. This fact, combined with other inherent problems in the bill, may be leading to C-13's defeat. Many Liberal backbenchers have criticized the bill. Liberal MP Paul Szabo has predicted it could go down to defeat (in no small measure because of his fight against it). C-13 is in trouble, although we never underestimate the ability of the Prime Minister's Office and Liberal Party Whip Don Boudria to ram through what the federal government wants. (Boudria has suggested that there will be no free vote on C-13.) We need you to contact your MPs, as well as call and visit them urging them to vote to defeat C-13. No amendments will make this bill supportable. It must be voted down.

Last month, we listed on page 2 of the Campaign Life Coalition National News MPs whom we said opposed Bill C-13. These MPs who spoke out against the bill in speeches on the House floor were recorded in Hansard. Next month we will have a list of all the MPs who are opposed to C-13. In the meantime, keep urging your MPs to vote against this eggregious bill.

The Ontario election call came shortly after we went to press last time and election day will be very close to the time you receive this issue of the Campaign Life Coalition National News. If you live in PEI, the election for September 29 will probably have been held (the mail takes longer to get there.) There are also rumours of a Newfoundland election. If you receive this in time - that is, before election day - please:

1) Contact the candidates in your riding to determine where they stand on life and family issues. Don't let them get away with claiming that these are federal issues. There is a lot that the provinces can do, including defunding abortion, protecting the conscience rights of healthcare workers, opposing the easy distribution of abortifacient drugs, etc... Because you are pro-life, the most important value your elected representative should share with you is his or her commitment to protecting the sanctity of innocent human life.

2) Contact CLC for information about the candidates. A fair number of candidates are returning their questionnaires and we are able to make a determination as to whether there are pro-life candidates in a good many ridings. (In an unusual twist, the Ontario P.C.s have actually encouraged candidates to respond to our questionnaire. Normally, the parties try to dodge grassroots input so this represents a pleasant turn of events.) Even if you have talked to your candidates, it is important to ensure that the answer they give to you is the same that they have committed to in the questionnaire. Also, the information you have collected is very useful to us.

3) Vote pro-life. If there is no pro-life candidate, you might want to consider defeating the incumbent. If the new provincial representative is not pro-life, defeat him or her next time. This demonstrates to our elected officials that there is a political price to pay for not being pro-life. Or you can write on the ballot in blue ink "No pro-life Liberal" (or whatever party you support).

In Ontario, there seems to be little offered to pro-life, pro-family voters, by the three mainstream parties: Ernie Eves, the Tory leader, is pro-abortion and has flip-flopped on same-sex "marriage"; Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty is pro-abortion and favours re-defining marriage; NDP leader Howard Hampton is pro-abortion and pro same-sex "marriage." The only safe party for pro-lifers to support is the Family Coalition Party, the only one with genuine pro-family, life-affirming policies and a leader committed to those policies. In addition, there are numerous pro-life MPPs in Ontario. Please make an extra special effort to support sitting pro-life MPPs - their experience, leadership and continued success means so much to the pro-life cause that we cannot afford to turn our backs on these courageous men and women.

Regardless of the province we live in, it is vitally important that we elect representatives that are pro-life wherever we can. None of the other issues are as important as abortion; no other issue is a matter, literally, of life and death.

On September 16, a Canadian Alliance motion to reaffirm the traditional definition of marriage was narrowly defeated in parliament, 137-132. Almost 30 MPs were absent for this very important vote and one-third of the Liberal caucus joined the entire CA, most of the Progressive Conservative party and a handful of Bloc Quebecois MPs in voting for the motion that reaffirms the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.

There was an attempt to amend the motion so not to require Parliament to "take all necessary steps … to preserve this definition of marriage in Canada." It was thought that this would make the motion more amenable to the Liberal backbenchers. The amendment was defeated when Speaker of the House Peter Milliken broke a tie vote by voting against it. The Prime Minister pressured Liberal MPs and cabinet ministers to oppose the motion and CTV's Mike Duffy stated after the vote, "Were it truly a free vote, it probably would have passed."

The battle is far from over.

Please continue politely, but firmly expressing your opposition to changing the definition of marriage from the "union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others" to the union of "two people." It is clear that many MPs have already spoken out against the proposed changes because of the massive ground-swell of opposition to the court's redefinition of marriage and the government's capitulation to that ruling. We are also concerned about how the debate over same-sex "marriage" will proceed if C-250 (Svend Robinson's hate crimes legislation) is enacted as the next story demonstrates.

The Toronto Star published a column by Fr. Alphonse de Valk, editor of Catholic Insight, on September 1, that examined the Catholic stand on homosexuality. In a straight-forward but hard-hitting manner, Fr. de Valk outlined the teachings of the Catholic Church: "The homosexual condition is a disorder, and homosexual acts are grave moral aberrations." LifeSite News reports that of "ten subsequent letters to the Star responding to Fr. de Valk's article, six accused the priest of hate crime." Despite the fact that Fr. de Valk merely presented Church teaching on the matter, distinguishing between homosexual acts and persons with homosexual inclinations, he was nevertheless accused of hate."

Fr. de Valk told LifeSite that the responses to his article in the Toronto Star claiming he violated hate crime law should be a warning to politicians against passing Bill C-250 which adds "sexual orientation" to hate crime law. These warnings were not heeded and Parliament passed C-250 on September 17. Now our only hope is for the Senate to defeat these special protections for homosexuals that demonstrably endanger the free speech rights of people of faith to speak out against homosexual acts. As the angry letters to the Star demonstrate, some activists hope to silence the political debate over same-sex "marriage" using spurious hate crimes laws.

On two recent occasions when CLC President Jim Hughes spoke in RC churches and made passing references to organizations at the UN who were pushing for abortion as an international human right and advocating special rights for homosexuals and lesbians he was confronted afterwards by persons accusing him of promoting hatred. It strongly appears that the word "hate" is being defined to mean speaking in defence of any traditional sexual morality because it may offend someone.

The dangerous new pattern is personal offense = hate = criminal offence.

The September 4 Globe and Mail reported that Canadian Alliance leader Stephen Harper says the success of gay "marriage" efforts in recent years has been orchestrated by the federal Liberals. Harper, the paper reports, says the Liberals wanted to avert the political pressure of changing marriage laws so they did it with the help of the justice system, stacking the courts with liberal judges and deliberately losing cases so that they would be forced to legalize gay "marriage." Harper said: "The fix was in years ago."

It sounds conspiratorial, but many pro-family activists would likely agree with Harper's analysis given the government's obvious low regard for democratic process, its years of use of the courts to bypass Parliament and the many millions of dollars of direct funding that it has given to radical groups to challenge federal laws. Of course, there is also the body of legal opinion that says that the Justice department did a poor job defending the government's position; indeed, Justice Minister Martin Cauchon has led the department in recent years and he favours changing the definition of marriage to include homosexual couples. You have to wonder about his leadership in such cases and the half-hearted defense the feds made in the courts in recent years on this issue.

It is a shame that the leadership of the Liberal party has capitulated to the gay agenda - whether by design or otherwise - considering the millions of pro-family Liberals in Canada, including many outspoken traditional value MPs.

Sanctity of Marriage Week demonstrations took place at hundreds of MPs constituency offices throughout the country September 7 at 3 p.m. Tens of thousands of Canadians of all cultures and creeds gathered to pray for the protection of traditional marriage. At many meetings, the crowds were composed of blacks, whites and Asians, and all denominations and religions were represented. It is truly amazing to watch so many Canadians come together to take a strong stand on marriage. We hope that you will continue to pray for the protection of marriage, for the MPs during this difficult time of unreal political pressure and for the future of our nation.

Liberal MP Tom Wappel has warned that the supposed compromise strategy of retaining the current definition of marriage but allowing the legal recognition of same-sex unions simply "won't work."

He said the problem with the legal recognition of same-sex unions is twofold. On the pragmatic level, Wappel said, "it has already been rejected by the Ontario Court of Appeal as being effectively separate but equal which has already been rejected in human rights cases and it is most certainly rejected by the homosexual community."

Wappel said that if this compromise is accepted, "we'll find that five, six years from now, having gone for it, everybody else being placated and saying OK everybody lets their guard down, then we'll have another court of appeal or even the Supreme Court saying it's separate but equal folks - it won't work." The experienced MP said "It will only delay the inevitable and give society more time to adjust to what is already taking place and breaking down the barriers just a little bit further." More importantly, the legal recognition of homosexual unions still undermines the family and assaults the uniqueness of the complimentary heterosexual relationship on which family is based.

The National Marriage Day rally was held August 23 on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and attracted at least 8,000 participants. The official police estimate was 6,000, but the approximately 3,000 Chinese Christian Canadians in bright red t-shirts were visibly about one-third of the protesters making the official number very low. (Some 3000 members under the banner of "Chinese Christian Canadians" came to the rally by bus from Toronto. They all wore bright red t-shirts with the slogan "Marriage = One Man + One Woman and carried large banners saying "Say NO to redefining marriage.") The crowd heard church and political leaders who spoke passionately about the value of marriage to the nation and the crucial need to protect traditional marriage.

They were also bluntly warned that Canadian democracy and religious freedom have already been seriously eroded by activist judges and a Liberal government that have both by-passed parliament in their quest to radically change Canadian society. As often happens, the media ignored the event or missed the real story (despite being one of the largest rallies or demonstrations on Parliament Hill in years). For instance, the Ottawa Citizen and Toronto Star both used photos of two lesbians protesting the rally, ignoring the massive demonstration in defense of traditional marriage.

Director of International Affairs for Campaign Life Coalition Samantha Singson is at the United Nations monitoring the discussions on a cloning ban and the latest developments of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The discussions on human cloning are really still in a preliminary stage but we must be there to educate delegates on this important issue; whatever the UN rules to be permissible or wrong will have great sway over how countries regulate or restrict reproductive technologies.

The ICC's wide-ranging jurisdiction could eventually threaten legal restrictions on abortion in most countries as a hate crime against women. While there has been little discussion of this recently at the ICC level, it is a common tactic at these international proceedings for radical activists and their allies in countries sympathetic to their agenda (Canada, most of the European Union, New Zealand and Japan) to spring surprises on unsuspecting delegates who think that the United Nations remains committed solely to its original purpose of promoting world peace. Unfortunately, in recent years, it is more interested in promoting abortion, homosexuality, birth control and sexual promiscuity among teens, than ending famine or war. That is why CLC is committed to monitoring and exposing the radical agenda of certain countries and NGOs and educating delegates about life and family issues.

The Summer 2003 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons publishes the results of a study, "The Abortion-Breast Cancer Link: How Politics Trumped Science and Informed Consent," which has concluded that scientists, women's groups, and the media have consistently suppressed or ignored research that establishes a direct link between abortion and breast cancer and that they have done so for their own political purposes.

Author Karen Malec points out that authors of studies showing the ABC link actually denied their own findings when political heat was applied. One lead author of a record-linkage case study in 1989 worked with a group of American Cancer Society (ACS) researchers who reviewed the research. By then 11 of 12 US studies indicated increased risk, but she still stated the research - including her own - was "inconsistent" and that she could not arrive at "definitive conclusions."

In another case, the political bias was strongly implied. The president of the American Society of Breast Surgeons said that she presented her concerns about getting information to the public about the abortion-breast cancer link, but the board felt it was "too political." Furthermore, the study found women considering abortion are not given true informed consent about the real risks of the procedure as a result of withholding this evidence. The article discusses the epidemiologic evidence of an ABC link, the silence and denial of the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association and women's groups; media bias; the bitter opposition from pro-abortion politicians; the implications for patient care; and medical malpractice issues. Malec says that it may be the trial lawyers, not the medical community, who force full disclosure through liability litigation against those who commit abortions without providing women with fully informed disclosure about the elevated risk. This last item is one reason why CLC questions provincial candidates about where they stand on women's right to know legislation.

On September 2, Saskatchewan's NDP Government allowed pharmacists to dispense the abortifacient morning after pill without a doctor's prescription. Under the new regulations, after taking a short course, pharmacists are able to dole out the abortifacient drugs even to young girls without parental notification.

"We have 245 out of 358 pharmacies in the province offering this service as of late last week," Ray Joubert, registrar with the Saskatchewan Pharmaceutical Association told the Canadian Press. Pro-lifers oppose the easy distribution of these pills because they kill unborn babies by making the uterine wall inhospitable to newly conceived life. Furthermore, it is dangerous for young girls to use these pills and we believe governments put women's health at risk by removing the doctor from these decisions; a doctor, unlike a pharmacist, usually has a more thorough relationship with and more information about a patient and is thus more qualified to detect the health problems that may arise from frequent or regular use of the morning-after pill.

The 2003 National Pro-Life Conference will take place Nov. 6-8 at The Fantasyland Hotel in Edmonton at the world famous West Edmonton Mall.

Hosted by the Alberta Pro-Life Alliance Association and sponsored by Campaign Life Coalition, the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and Life Canada, the theme is Silent No More and will feature speakers such as Scott Klusendorf of Stand to Reason; Ted Byfield, founder of Alberta Report; Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; Heather Stilwell, a trustee with the Surrey Public School Board; Bryan Kemper of Rock for Life and many more. The banquet speaker will be noted abortion researcher David Reardon of the Elliot Institute.

The full conference is $150 for adults, $75 for youth 25 & under; to attend on Saturday, its $95 or $50 for youth; and the banquet is $45 per person. To register, call us at (416) 204-9749 or toll free at 1-800-730-5358. If you are able, please plan to join us at this extra special event for the national pro-life community.

Over 900 communities were involved in North American LifeChains in Canada and the United States last year. This year, join hundreds of thousands of pro-lifers on October 5 for a powerful local prayerful witness. Organizers have asked, "Will unborn children in your city have Life Chain protection?"

Last month we erroneously reported that Saskatchewan does not hold LifeChain in October - they certainly do. Sorry for the misunderstanding. People in that province are especially encouraged to get the word out about LifeChain. Also, please send pictures of your local event to us for use in upcoming publications and future promotional materials. Contact your local pro-life group or Sophia at our Toronto office (416-204-9749 or 1-800-730-5358) for more information, including exact locations.

Yours for life
Jim Hughes
National President