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There are few certainties in life, but we can all rest assured that Monday mornings are the worst time of the week. For Fredericton residents who started off their morning staring at the image of an aborted fetus, ‘a bad case of the Mondays’ holds whole new meaning. Mugs of coffee were dropped as North Frederictoners, still standing in their bath robes and rubbing the crust out of their eyes, opened their mailboxes to graphic anti-abortion postcards. The postcards depicted a five month old aborted fetus along with a photo of Liberal leader Brian Gallant and a message that read, “A vote for Brian Gallant and the Liberals is a vote for this.” Come on, if they were going to go to all the effort of placing these postcards in countless Fredericton mailboxes, they could have at least thought of a better caption to match its startling image. Think, “Brian Gallant is an accident you won’t be able to abort.”

The culprits? members of Campaign Life Coalition Youth (CLCY) and the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CCBR). Michael Furlong, whose house home to his two young children as well as his wife who teaches piano lessons out of it, immediately ripped up the postcard from his mailbox but found another one lying on his front step. Here’s a tip, if you’re going to voice a message, try not to advertise it like a ghost would haunt someone, leaving small omens around for its subject to creepily discover. “My personal reaction to it is that it’s obscene,” Furlong told CBC News, “You don’t put something like this out, running the risk that children are going to see it.” It was after this that Furlong called CLCY and spoke to a woman there. He told the CBC, “Her reply to me was, ‘Yes, they [children] have to see that, they have to be aware of this stuff and they have to know what’s going on.'”

 

Could you live in a world where this hair was aborted?Acadie Nouvelle

Could you live in a world where Brian Gallant’s hair was aborted?
Acadie Nouvelle

 

Alex Vande Bruinhorst, spokesperson for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, stated, “Our goal is to raise awareness about the fact that abortion is a human rights violation that decapitates, dismembers and disembowels the body of a child – the most vulnerable and youngest of our kind.” Of course, if you want to protect your children, you just need to start sending them postcards of mutilated fetuses; after all, children need to learn that not all postcards are of the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the New York skyline.

Alissa Golob, youth co-ordinator for CLCY, said in a statement, “Gallant is ignoring 73 per cent of the population who do not support the public funding of abortion on demand, many of whom do not support abortion at all.” Gallant, with perfect hair, describes the situation as, “very disappointing and very unfortunate,” saying, “There’s no doubt that during a campaign you’ll have many people that will try to influence people’s votes, and that’s normal and that’s something that we certainly accept…we do think it’s OK to debate and discuss and to have conversations, but to send graphic photos like that, we do think is crossing a line.” As premier, Gallant has promised he’d review New Brunswick’s abortion laws, adding, “We would act swiftly to ensure that we find any barriers to a woman’s right to choose and eliminate them.”

As I said earlier, their are few certainties in life. The polarization of the abortion topic remains as certain as Monday mornings sucking. Thankfully, Ali G has already articulated Gallant’s argument, below: