Pro-life advocates will get a rare chance to hear from pro-life prisoner of conscience Linda Gibbons next week as she will deliver her first public talk in years at the Toronto Pro-Life Forum on June 24-25th.
The great-grandmother has spent ten of the last 17 years in jail for witnessing peacefully outside Toronto abortion facilities in violation of a 1994 court injunction that banned pro-life activity within a specified zone around the facilities. She was released last week after over two years of continuous imprisonment and is preparing to challenge the injunction yet again at the end of July.
This time around, she told LifeSiteNews last week, she is calling on pro-lifers to join her. "I really feel if we're going to turn this around, there has to be some kind of a mobilization," she said.
The Toronto Pro-Life Forum takes place June 24-25 at the Hotel Novotel Toronto Centre. It is sponsored by Campaign Life Coalition, and co-sponsored by LifeSiteNews and Niagara Region Right to Life.
The weekend event features a dinner on Friday night with an address by veteran pro-life journalist Brian Lilley, who hosts the show Byline on the new Sun News Network. A day-long conference follows on Saturday with themed panels on current life and family issues.
Speakers include Nicole Campbell, coordinator of 40 Days For Life in Toronto; John-Henry Westen, Editor-in-Chief of LifeSiteNews.com; Steve Jalsevac, Managing Director, LifeSiteNews.com; Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition; Alissa Golob, Director of CLC Youth; Tom Wappel, former Member of Parliament; and Jim Hughes, National President of Campaign Life Coalition.
"When we begin to suffer for the unborn, our identification with them, that's when we're going to impact society, when they see that," Gibbons told LifeSiteNews after she was released last week. "The Church is not hurting enough for the unborn. When we start feeling their hurt in a real concrete way, then things are going to change, because then we're saying very clearly that this cannot go on."
Gibbons' 17-year campaign has been fueled by a deep love for children in the womb, and hence a keen awareness of the atrocity of abortion. She has taken to heart a question she was asked once by a Jewish reporter from the Ottawa Citizen: "Are you pro-lifers really acting like abortion is murder?"
"If a two-year-old was being murdered next door, you're not going to sit down and write a letter to your MP," she said. "That we need to do more, that's obvious, obvious. ½ If I was going into a house to save a child from a fire, no one's going to charge me with trespass for that."
"I want [my life] to be a witness that the lives of these children cannot be forgotten," she continued. "I'm ready to surrender all my assets, ½ all my time. [Otherwise,] we're saying these babies must be allowed to die so I can stay in my comfort zone. Because what we say then is it doesn't matter."
The conference will also feature panels addressing the homosexual equity policy being imposed on Catholics by the Ontario government, the controversy over Development & Peace, and the significance of the Canada's new Conservative majority government for the pro-life movement.
Registration for both the Friday dinner and the Saturday conference costs $145. Tickets for just the dinner cost $75, and for just the conference $95. Tickets can be purchased online here, or call Melissa at 1-800-730-5358.
For more information, visit the Toronto Pro-Life Forum website here.
Meditate on that which is good - do you love death?