National March for Life

Angelina Steenstra
National Coordinator
Silent No More Awareness Campaign
Press Statement for the 40th Memorial Year March for Life

Good morning.  My name is Angelina Steenstra. I am one of the few people you may meet in your journalistic career who is willing to talk about the devastating impact of my own abortion after a date rape when I was a teenager.

My story is only one of 3.2 million abortion stories that make up the past 40 years of abortion in Canada.

Many of your newspaper, radio, and television reports in the next few days will, no doubt, examine the devastating effects that 40 years have had on these millions of mothers, fathers, and babies, and also on our moral conscience as a nation.

Over these years, things have changed.  Many would say back then the unborn child was a “blob of tissue.”  Today, even abortionists, if they are honest, will repeat the DNA science that from the moment of conception we are dealing with a human being – there is no room for doubt.

But when I had my abortion, I was told it was no big deal – that it would solve my problems.  In fact, it made them worse.  I lived in denial as an escape from the emotional, spiritual, physical, and relational pain.  And I am only one of millions of women who have suffered from the many after-effects of abortion.

Today, after all these years, in the psychological journals there is a slowly growing recognition of the damage done to men and women.  Let’s not cover up this story for another forty years.

Let’s realize that there can be “A Future Without Abortion” – that years of killing three million babies kills our conscience and leads to a further devaluing of human life. 

There is room in Canada for the more compassionate care of pregnant mothers, with all their difficult circumstances, in the coming forty years. 

But, our political, legal, medical, and academic professions need to reclaim a lost moral ethic to defend the dignity of human life if we are to face the challenges to human dignity that await us in the years ahead. 

Thank you.