Day One, a series of excerpts from Without Apology that describe the first attempt at telling the truth about abortion in Canada.
Blinded by the Right: My Past as an Anti-abortion Activist
To start, I didn’t want to write this. So I searched, hoping to find someone who had a similar experience to share so that I could read their own take on their progression from a “pro-life/anti-choice/anti-abortion” position to believing in and advocating for abortion rights. I’m sharing this story of my past anti-choice activism because it is a past I have been ashamed of. Yet it also shaped me and is part of what, ironically, made me who I am today.
This, in the end, is a story about how destructive the anti-abortion movement can be not only to society but to individuals as well.
In the late 1980s, when I was sixteen, my mother decided to move our family away from the “rough” inner city of Toronto and tuck us away in safe, clean, boring suburbia.
The day Canada’s abortion law was struck down, I recall my mother watching the news and listening to the reaction from the public. She was motivated to do something, to get involved. She was determined to take a stand. I didn’t really know or care about this issue. I was still just a kid, really, in high school, sort of geeky, blessed with an awkward nature and a teenager’s skin.
My mother, however, decided that we (that is, my mom, my sisters, and I) would go picket the hospital circuit with our homemade anti-choice signs and hand out pamphlets spouting anti-abortion propaganda. Regularly, after school, we would travel downtown with her from Etobicoke, grabbing some veggie pitas en route, and protest the “killing” of the unborn in front of the hospitals. I’d beg to do something else after school, to go out with friends, but the answer was always no. There was no other option. Picketing and homework were my lot.
An excerpt from Natalie Lochwin’s chapter in Without Apology: Writings on Abortion in Canada, edited by Shannon Stettner.
