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Funding Abortion Advocacy

Church leaders in Canada—including the bishops’ conference—reacted uncomfortably to
the revelation that they had thrown their support behind a radical feminist initiative.

By John-Henry Westen

On March 7, one day before International Women’s Day, a group of Quebec feminists held a demonstration in Montreal. Their protest was supposedly directed against poverty. But in fact more than 20 of the participants stormed into the city’s Mary Queen of the World Cathedral burning homemade crosses, spray-painting altars and walls, blaspheming, throwing condoms, and attempting to overturn the tabernacle. As they desecrated the cathedral, the feminist vandals proclaimed their support for the legal right to abortion. The attack—which saw the destruction of hundreds of hymnals, and left soiled sanitary napkins stuck to paintings—received only scant coverage in the Canadian media.

That shocking event came just before the opening of the March for Women 2000, a feminist activist-educational endeavor that will span from March 8 to October 17. Oddly, the March for Women was given support by the Catholic Church leadership in Canada despite its support for abortion and lesbian rights. The Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace (CCODP), the official social justice arm of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) donated $110,000 to the March over a period of three years (1997-2000). The CCCB itself also endorsed the March with a letter signed by Bishop Gerald Wiesner, the president of the CCCB. Following the CCCB lead, the Catholic Women’s League (CWL) also endorsed the March, encouraging all of its members to participate.

The official stated objectives of the March for Women—opposition to poverty and violence—are commendable enough. However, the interpretation given to the terms “poverty” and “violence” by the feminists in charge of the March puts their effort squarely in support of legal abortion, homosexuality, and the same radical feminist agenda against which the Holy See is constantly battling at the United Nations.

The CCCB explained in its letter of endorsement that its support for the March includes only “the March’s objectives of ending poverty and violence against women in keeping with the position of the Holy See at several recent International Conferences.” In other words, the bishops’ statement explained, the endorsement does not interpret “the terms ‘reproductive health,’ ‘sexual health,’ and ‘reproductive rights’ as including abortion or access to abortion.” Moreover, the bishops’ statement stipulated that the endorsement should not be taken as approval of “ambiguous terminology concerning unqualified control over sexuality and fertility insofar as it could be interpreted as societal endorsement of abortion or homosexuality.”

The feminist agenda

Regardless of the wishes of the bishops, the organizers of the March were clear in their intent that the language of their statements would include support for abortion and lesbian activism. Under the category “Demands to eliminate violence against women,” as listed in the official “World Demands of the March,” section V-2 demands that “all states must recognize a woman’s right to determine her own destiny, and to exercise control over her body and reproductive function.” And in keeping with this abortion mandate, the March also demands “that States harmonize their national laws” with the cause of legalized abortion. The March also promotes the approval of the feminist-inspired International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

The lesbian thrust of the official document appears in the same clear light, in section V-10 and V-11 of the “Demands.” There the organizers say that “based on the principle of equality of all persons, the United Nations and States of the international community recognize formally that a person’s sexual orientation should not bar them from the full exercise of their rights.” They also demand “that the right to asylum for victims of discrimination and persecution based on sexual orientation be adopted as soon as possible.”

The evident clarity of these words was not enough to dissuade some other major Catholic sponsors from participation in the March. So, for instance, the CWL decided to give the effort its endorsement, and to urge all its members to participate in the March. In a letter to the group’s diocesan leaders, CWL President Sheilah Pellerin said: “It is our hope that this will be an all-council endeavor.”

The CWL leadership harbored no illusions about the position of the March regarding abortion, as another bit of official correspondence proved. Betty Anne Brown, the president of the Ontario province of CWL, warned local presidents that if they ordered kits from the March for Women organization, they should remove the “document outlining the national demands for the March,” and other materials that would identify “the right to free, public abortion services” as one of the key demands of the March. The Brown letter asserted that the CWL did not support this demand of the March. However, through that deliberate effort to remove evidence of pro-abortion advocacy, the CWL leadership encouraged its members to participate, perhaps unknowingly, in an effort that demanded (in the words of the Brown letter) “the right to free, public abortion services.”

Still, while the bishops’ conference and the CWL gave some support to the March, the most tangible support came from the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace, which contributed $110,000 to the March effort. That generous grant—which came, ultimately, from loyal Catholic parishioners —is doubly remarkable in this case, because the CCODP had already been reprimanded publicly for supporting a similar feminist “anti-poverty” march four years ago, with a comparatively meager grant of $2,000.

Controversy within the Catholic Church over the official support for the March for Women began to arise when faithful Catholic women began to investigate the effort which the CWL had supported. Some women began to investigate the structure of the March for Women, and to contact the CWL leadership and their diocesan bishops with their concerns. They discovered that the March was organized on both a national and international basis, and that the organizational leadership in Canada was even more explicitly pro-abortion and pro-lesbian than the international body. The Canadian Women’s March Committee included two major pro-abortion activist groups: the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. The statement on the “demands” of the March, as set forth on the Canadian organizers’ web site, included the statement: “We won the right to control when and if we choose to have children with the decriminalization of abortion and contraception.” The web site also urged all supporters of the March to contact their political representatives, lobbying them to amend a particular piece of legislation before parliament; the amendment sought by the March sponsors would have changed the definition of marriage so that it would not be restricted solely to heterosexual couples.

Scandal and response

The scandal over Catholic support for the March became public in early April, because of coverage by LifeSite News, a Canadian pro-life news service. [The author of this article is editor of LifeSite News.- Ed.] As the story became more widely known, CWL members stepped up the pressure on their national leaders to explain the group’s endorsement of the March, and urged them to distance themselves explicitly from the March’s goals on abortion, lesbian rights, and other radical feminist issues. Catholic lay people and priests contacted their bishops to register their shock and dismay over the CCCB endorsement. And numerous priests and faithful decided to withhold funds from CCODP in protest against that group’s donation to the March. The refusal to donate to CCODP could not have come at a more important time for the CCODP, since the group’s annual fundraising drive in Catholic parishes across Canada takes place on Good Friday—a date which fell this year only weeks after the controversy exploded into public view.

The pressure on the CWL proved effective. Within days of the story’s first appearance in the LifeSite news, on April 6, the CWL national president wrote a letter to the Canadian coordinator of the March for Women, asking for the withdrawal of one of the “demands” of the March, namely “the right to free, public abortion services.”

“We are concerned that the inclusion of this demand will lead to the loss of participation of thousands of women,” wrote Sheilah Pellerin. “With so much poverty and violence against women, it is unfortunate that the articulation of the one issue that could divide us was retained.” However, Pellerin made no mention of any intention to withdraw from the March if the demand for abortion was not removed from the list of objectives. She also failed to address the March’s strong lesbian aspect.

The reaction from the Canadian hierarchy was slow in coming, but many bishops privately expressed their outrage at the funding of the March and the CCCB endorsement. Bishop Anthony Tonnos of Hamilton, Ontario, made his response public. In an April 19 letter to a concerned member of his diocese, Bishop Tonnos wrote: “The CWL in the Diocese of Hamilton has already notified the national CWL office that our diocese will not be supporting this undertaking.” He continued: “I have also expressed my personal dissatisfaction to Development and Peace [the CCODP] and to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops.”

The most disturbing reaction to the controversy, however, came from the CCODP. When the group’s financial support for the March was questioned, the CCODP leaders claimed to be the victims of a “disinformation campaign.” The executive director of CCODP, Fabien Loboeuf, wrote:

Development and Peace and the CCCB support the international demands of the World March (not the demands of the Canadian Women’s March Committee which refer to abortion; there is another set of demands by the Federation des femmes du Quebec which does not mention abortion).

All doubts erased

Of course, proponents of legalized abortion can stake out their position without ever making any explicit use of the word “abortion.” Indeed the CCODP letter concedes that while the international demands of the March “contain no reference to abortion,” they do include a reference to a woman’s right to control over “her body and reproductive function.” The Loboeuf letter argues, however, that “this particular demand is based on a broad set of concerns, which include the cry of women in the South for an end to forced sterilization, forced abortion, genital mutilation, and forced marriage.” While all that may be true, Loboeuf’s statement is deceptive, since the language of that demand, as it is commonly understood, refers especially to abortion.

A letter from the International (not the Canadian) coordinating committee confirms the accuracy of that interpretation of the group’s language. The letter came in response to a pro-life group’s request to have a pro-life presence incorporated into the March of Women 2000. Diane Matte, head of the international coordinating committee of the World March of Women, wrote that at a meeting of the March leadership on January 28, it was “unanimously decided that the demand to have a ‘pro-life’ contingent at the World March is unacceptable to us since the anti-choice position defended by your organization is in clear contradiction with the objectives pursued by the March.” The letter noted further that “the pro-life suggestion is specifically” at odds “with one of our world demands.” And Matte helpfully spelled out that demand, arguing that “all States must recognize a woman’s right to determine her own destiny, and to exercise control over her body and reproductive function.”

Demonstrating unwavering commitment to abortion as a key demand of the march, the Matte letter concludes, “We believe that the most respectful way to avoid pointless discussions and confrontations is for you not to pursue your idea to organize a ‘pro-life’ contingent.”

It is telling that the CCODP, while it has given $110,000 to the Women’s March out of the funds collected from Catholic parishioners, has not contributed anything to the annual March for Life in Ottawa, which protests the over two million children killed by abortion in Canada.

John-Henry Westen is editor of LifeSite News (www.lsn.ca), an internet news service of Canada’s pro-life pro-family newspaper, the Interim.

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