Obey God or Man? Canadian Pro-lifers Choose God

Canada's Shame: Pro-lifers get Prison while Canadians are Killed Seconds Before Birth

by Susan Fox

(Editor's Note: Mary Wagner was released from prison on July 25, 2015, after serving 7 months as a "prisoner of conscience" in the Vanier Centre for Women outside Toronto. Fellow Canadian prisoner of conscience Linda Gibbons went back to prison Sept. 2, 2015 after holding a sign outside an abortion clinic.) 

Pro-life Defender Mary Wagner in Poland
in better times.
She was imprisoned Christmas Eve in Canada

Poor St. Peter, he healed a lame beggar, and that’s when his troubles began.

“Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” (Acts 3:6)

And then the man “jumped” to his feet, and began to walk.

So Peter and John were hauled off to jail for an act of kindness.

When they were released, the elders of Jerusalem admonished them to stop teaching or preaching in the name of Jesus. But who should they obey? God or man?

“Peter and John, however, said to them in reply, “Whether it is right in the sight of God for us to obey you rather than God, you be the judges. It is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:19-20) 

Answer: Obey God.

So it is with Canadian Pro-Life Witness Mary Wagner imprisoned on Christmas Eve in a Maximum Security Prison in Milton, outside Toronto, for interrupting the “lawful enjoyment” of the business of an abortion clinic. We have  here special businesses that “enjoy” the murder of children, an act that many in the world call a crime against humanity.

In Canada, a child can be killed up to seconds before natural birth without any penalty. About 100,000 unborn Canadians are killed every year through surgical abortion out of a population of 33 million. It is estimated that four million have died in 45 years in a country in which all “persons” are guaranteed the right to life.

Welcome to the Civilization of Death.

Ironically, Mary Wagner did not try to interfere with the business of the abortion clinic: the doctors/nurses performing abortions, the bookkeepers keeping records, and the secretaries answering the phones.

But she did enter the clinic to influence mothers whose “choice” has been enshrined in secular society as a “human right.” Apparently that “human right” is only sacred if they intend to abort their child. Clearly, they are not allowed to change their minds.

Most of those women aren’t there because of choice anyway. They will tell you their parents, their boyfriends, their statutory rapist or their fears of career/financial insecurity is forcing them to have the abortion.

What is Mary’s crime deserving of a maximum-security prison cell on Christmas Eve, 2014? She politely entered the Bloor West Women's Clinic in Toronto two days before Christmas, handed out roses, cards and requested the mothers let their children live, offering real assistance in an attempt to remove their fear.

For similar acts Aug. 12, 2012, Mary Wagner was jailed and spent almost 2 years in prison. An abortion clinic worker testified in Mary’s 2013 trial that she caught her kneeling at the feet of a patient and offering her a rose. Oh my. That would frighten me too! As the ridiculous Queen of Hearts in Wonderland yelled, “Off with her head!”

Canada’s consciences have been lulled to sleep in the recent decades because of a law that says if you are caught and convicted three times trying to influence decisions of women in or near an abortion clinic, you go to jail for increasingly longer terms per each offense. “People have a sense of being defeated by this,” Wagner said in a Polish television interview.

Even pro-lifers standing on a public sidewalk outside an abortion clinic are arrested. “Canadians are used to the status quo,” Wagner said. “The sense of defeatism and apathy (on the subject of abortion) is widespread in the country.”

Canadian pro-life witness
Linda Gibbons
The poster reads:
 "Why Mom? When I have
so much love to give."

I have witnessed many times outside an abortion clinic on a public sidewalk in the United States, and by Canada’s law I should be in prison for life. We witnessed the largest protest in the history of the pro-life movement on Aug. 22, 2015 in 354 locations worldwide with total participation  greater than 78,590 people. But for the same “crime,” Canadian Pro-Life Defender Linda Gibbons has spent 10 of the last 25 years in prison.

“We don’t go there to be arrested,” Gibbons said in an interview with “Beyond the Talk.” “We go there to be the last opportunity to rescue a child from being decapitated, dismembered and disemboweled.” And to the mothers, she offers real assistance and one last chance to change their minds.

Police arresting Linda Gibbons.
Do they feel foolish handcuffing
a peaceful little old lady?

The other critical gift she offers is fetal development information. Gibbons has met many grieving mothers after the abortion. They often explain they were entirely ignorant of fetal development. One woman told her she had asked the abortion doctor what a four-month-old unborn child was like, and she was told, “It is a blob of cells.”

Gibbons showed her the model of a child at that stage of development and the now-childless mother was heartsick. The unborn child looks like a tiny human being even at eight weeks from conception. I saw my son Raphael at that stage right after his miscarriage, whole and entire. I recognized my husband’s long legs and face. He was our son! Reality is different than what the words “blob of cells” conveys.

Linda Gibbons and Mary Wagner
The two are good friends, and support one another
in and out of prison. 

Both Gibbons’ and Wagner’s rights have been violated because Canadian law also guarantees an individual “freedom of expression, conscience and religion.” And the Criminal Code says you cannot go to jail for using reasonable means to prevent an assault upon another person. At the heart of the issue is the Canadian government’s stubborn refusal to recognize a “person” in the womb. In Mary’s trial, the judge refused to hear testimony even from a non-Christian embryologist. No doctors, no scientists were allowed inside the courtroom.  

 

While largely ignored by big media in U.S. and
Canada, Mary Wagner's arrest is headline news
in Poland, where they are organizing a protest on
Jan. 8 outside the Canadian Embassy in Warsaw

Mary Wagner is a hero in the predominantly Catholic country of Poland. “Although it seems unbelievable that in Canada someone was sentenced to prison for Catholic beliefs, it unfortunately happens,” one Polish newspaper opined. Poles have created a petition to the Canadian Prime Minister, rightfully declaring Canada’s continued incarceration of Mary Wagner to be a violation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

 Article 19 of the Declaration states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

“The Canadian government takes great pride in boasting of its "human rights" positions - well, why is there another standard for our Angel for Life, Mary Wagner?” Toronto Catholic Witness blogger Barona pointedly asked. He has created a new Twitter hashtag, #RosaryforMary, inviting all to pledge to pray the Rosary for Mary Wagner.

So pro-lifers in Canada may not even defend themselves in court by saying they are there to protect the life of the child. In Wagner’s lengthy court trial, she tried unsuccessfully to use this reasoning to defend her actions in the abortion clinic. Her ultimate goal is to get the Canadian government to abandon its stubborn refusal to recognize the personhood of an unborn child. One of her judges angrily told Mary, “If you think you have the right to tell other women what to do you are wrong and your God is wrong!”

Both the judge and Legal Aid Ontario refused funding for her defense beyond the most basic charges. Crown counsel argued that when Wagner said she was trying to protect the child, she was “manufacturing” a defense to act as a guise for her political beliefs. That’s like the pot calling the kettle black!

 

Polish Facebook Page honoring Mary Wagner

Mary’s journey into witnessing for the unborn child began in Denver in 1993 during World Youth Day. “Pope John Paul II spoke to my heart: ‘Do not be afraid!’” Mary said. Saint John Paul II’s thinking very profoundly affected Mary throughout her trials because repeatedly in interviews she acknowledges that the Pope asked Catholics to disobey unjust laws.

Pope Saint John Paul II deeply
influenced Mary Wagner at World
Youth Day in Denver in 1993

“Abortion and euthanasia are thus crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws; instead there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection,” wrote the prophet John Paul II in the Gospel of Life.

The second event that led Mary into pro-life witnessing was a trip to the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. At least 1.1 million people were killed in Auschwitz gassed with a pesticide, a very painful death. Ninety percent of them were Jews.

“That was a very profound experience for me to see a place where there was a complete disregard for a certain group of people,” Mary said. “And then I read the guest book – ‘May this never happen again!’ People had written that over and over again.”

“But I thought, ‘This is happening again.’” She said God was preparing her “for a greater commitment to give more of myself in the struggle to protect life.”

The third event that influenced her was a friend who was working in medical research and his conscience was troubled by what he was working on. She began to pray for this man, “and in that context, it was like God lifted the veil for me and I saw the reality of what happens in an abortion.”

She said she never wanted to see a film of an abortion because it’s disturbing, “but it was as though God was forcing me to see that reality.” And so He began to lead her to draw closer to where it was concretely happening – to the “times and places where our unborn brothers and sisters are being killed.”

Are you Christian? Pro-life? If you are living in the United States, you still enjoy unparalleled freedom to witness on the public sidewalk outside abortion clinics nationwide without fear of arrest. Perhaps the heroic witness of our Canadian pro-life brothers and sisters will inspire you to pray for and speak to people outside the clinics.

But in Canada many ordinary heroes are needed. “I would hope there are enough God-fearing people in Canada who are appalled that Parliament sees no limits on its own authority to pass whatever laws it wants,” said, Dr. Charles Lugosi, Mary Wagner’s counsel. 

 

Dr. Charles Lugosi, J.D.
Mary Wagner's Counsel

“Our Constitution talks about the supremacy of God … and the rule of law, which is based on natural justice … Parliaments cannot pass laws that include some human beings and exclude other human beings from the human family,” he added. “If it starts with the unborn, it will go to the disabled and elderly … This is the time to wake up, get aggressive and get active. Let’s see if people are prepared to sacrifice.”

Yes, it is as my mother warned in the 1960s, there is an ugly creature lurking in the human conscience. Once a man accepts the murder of the unborn, then he has prepared for his own murder. We had legalized abortion in my youth, and now, I and my generation are ripe for involuntary euthanasia in our old age.

In going to jail on Christmas Eve, Mary Wagner’s feet were firmly planted on the Rock of Jesus Christ. It was He, who invited Peter and John to make an act of civil disobedience to Jewish authorities -- authorities who unjustly demanded they stop speaking about Jesus Christ.

And what would have happened if they obeyed man, and not God?

This effort owes many thanks to Toronto Catholic Witness for their courageous reporting on Mary Wagner's arrest. 

Find out about the latest Planned Parenthood Protest on Aug. 22, 2015 here. Planned Parenthood Videos Spark Protest of Biblical Proportions