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The Kensington Clinic is a nondescript, mostly grey building just off Crowchild Trail in Calgary. It sits opposite a playground where neighbourhood children gather in good weather, blissfully unaware of what is unfolding just across the street. Kensington Clinic is an abortion facility, where tragedy plays out daily while children climb the monkey bars nearby. Each year, hundreds of pre-born human beings are killed and discarded behind closed doors.

Abortion is legal throughout all nine months of pregnancy in Canada, and in Alberta, this has blurred the lines between prenatal and postnatal infanticide. In 2023-24, twenty-eight second- or third-trimester babies were reportedly born alive and left to die in Alberta hospitals after surviving abortions. This denial of care is not aberration, but policy. On average, this horror happens once every fourteen days in one of Canada’s most conservative provinces.

These barbaric practices bleed into everything. Some Albertans may remember the story of Katrina Effert, who gave birth to a baby boy on April 13, 2005. She strangled her newborn son with her underwear and tossed the corpse over the fence into her neighbour’s yard. In 2011, Effert’s murder conviction was “downgraded” to infanticide by the Edmonton Court of Queen’s Bench because, as the judge wrote:

While many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution… to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept, and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childbirth exact from mothers, especially mothers without support. [1]

In short, in strangling her baby boy, Effert was merely guilty of a very late-term abortion—something which Canadians apparently understand and accept. Effert received a suspended sentence—no jail time—for killing her child. It is a grim truth that the judge was merely applying the logic of abortion to a criminal case with consistency. The government funds the killing of children every day. Why should Effert be punished so severely for what was, in essence, a case of “less than ideal” procrastination?

Albertans are justly proud of their province for many reasons, but this love of home also demands that this injustice be addressed. A moral crisis of this magnitude demands a response from every Albertan who recognizes abortion for what it is: the physical destruction of a pre-born child developing in the womb.

The Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CCBR) offers an opportunity to respond. Founded in 2001, CCBR began offering a boots-on-the-ground pro-life internship in Calgary in 2010. After launching a national plan to reach millions of Canadians with the truth about abortion every year in 2012, CCBR dramatically scaled up pro-life outreach, and now offers annual internships in three provinces, including a four-month internship and a two-month internship in Calgary. Interns are trained in pro-life apologetics and , the history of social reform, and spend hours each week on the street, changing the hearts and minds of their fellow Albertans.

Over the past 16 years, CCBR staff, volunteers, and interns have had thousands of conversations with Albertans through during outreach and going door to door intitatives. Many pro-life Canadians tend to view the horrors of our abortion regime with a grim fatalism, believing that nothing truly effective can be done to combat the Culture of Death that has rooted itself so firmly even in the conservative soil of the prairies. But at CCBR, we know that much can be done. Every day, we see hearts and minds changed on abortion.

“Doing activism outside a college, it was really encouraging to see how many people were open and receptive to changing their minds,” CCBR’s Selina Mailloux says. “I had seven 7 conversations in one hour and six 6 of those people changed their minds. The seventh conversation was great, and he promised he would go home and think about everything we talked about.”

Virginia Wight had a similar experience at a post-secondary school in Calgary. “We realized that the students were off for that day, so we almost decided not to do ‘Choice’ Chain there, we considered moving to a different location instead,” she said. “But we went ahead with it anyway. I was holding a picture of a seven-week baby killed by an abortion pill.” Wight continued:

About 5-10 minutes in, I saw a woman walk by our display and I saw her just stop. She had kind of a stricken look on her face. I asked her what she thought and thankfully she came over. She said: This is me. She told me that she was 7 weeks pregnant, had just dropped out of classes and was considering abortion, thinking to herself, “I should just get rid of it.” She was in difficult circumstances that would have made it hard to go through with the pregnancy. But I managed to talk to her for a bit. I shared that lots of people were willing to help, to talk it through with her. We exchanged numbers.

I met with her for coffee several times. The first time, it seemed like she was still considering abortion. But by second time it seemed like she had settled that she was in fact going to keep her child.  I connected her with a pregnancy care center and put together a basket for her for Christmas. We are still in touch! The baby is due in May.

The first baby I (Jonathon) ever met that had been saved from abortion was scheduled to be killed at the Kensington Clinic. His mother walked past pro-lifers holding signs featuring abortion victims. She changed her mind. Months later, instead of taking her little boy to the abortion clinic, she went to the hospital to give birth to him. Holding him in my arms was one of the greatest moments of my life. Every September across Alberta, boys and girls who would have been killed in clinics climb onto buses and head off to school.

You can be part of this story.

There is much to do, and much that can be done. But we need young Albertans to consider joining this story, to put their boots on the ground, and to join us in reaching their neighbours with the truth so that more baby girls and baby boys can be welcomed into this beautiful country of ours.

[1] – Mark Steyn, “Fourth-Trimester Abortion,” National Review, 10 Oct. 2017, www.nationalreview.com/corner/fourth-trimester-abortion-mark-steyn/.