Youth Blog

LONDON, Ontario – Pro-life advocates in Ontario have achieved a victory after running a successful campaign that resulted in an ad company removing a massive pro-abortion billboard that was displayed in downtown London.

The ad, erected by the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC), displays the message in large white letters: Abortion is Healthcare. A smaller message asks viewers to donate to “protect abortion access” and shows a large QR code and the abortion organization’s website. The billboard was part of a larger national campaign that the organization launched in April.

“To call abortion healthcare is utter nonsense,” said Patricia Maloney, a pro-life writer and researcher, who led the campaign against the billboard. “Killing a child in the womb is a perversion of the very meaning of the word,” she told Campaign Life Coalition in an interview. “It doesn't take a genius to understand that.”

Maloney contacted the billboard company in early July, shortly after the ad went up, which was at the end of June. Maloney also emailed her supporters asking them to contact the company as well. She mobilized enough people to generate a response. She posted the company’s response to her concerns on her blog, Run with Life.

"We appreciate hearing from members of the community whenever they have concerns about advertising displayed on our network,” wrote Brightside Network Inc, the company that had been contracted by Billboard Hub to run the ad. “After receiving your message, we have paused this campaign while we review the matter with our client.”

ARCC ran a counter campaign to pressure the company to keep the billboard up. It sent an email blast on July 15, encouraging supporters to reach out to the company to save the billboard. But the company refused to back down. ARCC later admitted that some of the letters supporters sent were hostile, for which it later apologized.

“Sadly, amongst the messages they [the billboard company] received from our supporters were some aggressive ones and even personal attacks on their staff, which caused harm and trauma,” Joyce Arthur, ARCC’s Executive Director, wrote in a July 21 email to supporters.

The abortion group acknowledged that their ad was taken down because of what they called “anti-choice complaints and public pressure.” It also acknowledged that the billboard campaign backfired in London, pointing out that the “billboard was meant to reduce abortion stigma, and instead its removal reinforced the stigma.”

Maloney noted that the abortion group’s difficulty in placing the ad, as well as the billboard company’s response to complaints about it, may indicate a shift in the way the country, as a whole, views abortion.

“I think there might actually be a shift in Canada’s attitude towards abortion. The fact that 75% of billboard companies refused or didn't bother to respond to the pro-abortion group's quest to host the sign is quite telling,” she said, referring to ARCC’s article about the difficulty of finding a company to host its ads. “A private company is naturally loath to turn down any business, yet here we see that very thing happening.”

Pete Baklinski, Campaign Life Coalition’s Communications Director, agrees with Maloney that attitudes toward abortion may be shifting in Canada.

“That response [of canceling the ad] reveals something the abortion lobby does not want to admit: Canadians are increasingly uncomfortable with the lie that deliberately killing an innocent human being is ‘health care,’” he posted on X.

“This may seem like one billboard coming down—but it is also a sign of something much bigger: the abortion movement’s grip on Canadian culture is beginning to crumble.”