Disturbing postcards are landing on some Calgary doorsteps. They’re being hand-delivered by pro-life volunteers.
Some parents complain that the cards are exposing their kids to frightening images that are hard to explain – and not only that, in one case, it was kids who were doing the delivering.
Jodi Rempel says the card left at her door showed images comparing a murdered Rwandan child to an aborted fetus. It was left face-up on her front porch – accessible to her young son.
“So our kids are grabbing these and seeing them and then running to us asking questions. Or, in one case, a father came home and his child was sitting at the table or something crying because he had found these images,” said Rempel.
She says she supports free speech, but these pictures – thrust upon her and her Coventry Hills neighbours – go too far.
“There’s been a lot of reports of some kids having nightmares now," she said, "or they keep crying about it because they don’t understand.”
Phillippa Kondra’s grandkids were at her Braeside home when, she says, a boy and a girl that appeared to be under 10-years-old stuck a card in her mailbox. When she retrieved it, she found a postcard with photos comparing a dismembered doll to a dismembered fetus.
She says she was disturbed not only by the graphic content, but by the fact that children were tasked with distributing it.
“A 10-year-old is just a child,” said Kondra. “They don’t need to be exposed to very adult topics.”
The group behind the postcards, the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform, denies using 10-year-old volunteers. Activism Leader, Irene De Souza, says the youngest is 16-years-old.
De Souza says though her group regrets that children have seen the graphic postcards, the photos are necessary to advance the anti-abortion cause.
Constitutional lawyer John Carpay says the law only limits free speech if it can be classified as hate speech, incites criminal acts or is sexually obscene. He says that outlawing speech because it is offensive would be a slippery slope.
“If the law recognized a right not to be offended, and you and I and everybody else had a right not to be offended, there’d be no free speech left,” said Carpay.
However, the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada says it is possible to pass laws that would keep these kinds of postcards off of doorsteps.
“No city council in Canada has had the courage to pass a bylaw against such tactics, even though one could be written to pass constitutional scrutiny,” they wrote in an email to CTV.
The group went on to say that it is because of these tactics that the anti-choice movement is increasingly seen as extremist.
(With files from Lea Williams-Doherty)
