Ruth Lobo, past president of Carleton Lifeline, is fighting an ongoing legal battle with Carleton University. Photo by Deborah Gyapong / CCN.Ruth Lobo Shaw and John McLeod carry on an expensive legal battle with Carleton University
By Deborah Gyapong
The Canadian Catholic News
OTTAWA (CCN)--Pro-life activist Ruth Lobo Shaw and her co-plaintiff John Nicholas McLeod see their lawsuit against Carleton University as a matter of integrity, even though fighting it has cost them dearly.
“We firmly believe that our case has brought the abortion issue to the surface,” Lobo Shaw said in an interview from Calgary.
Albertos Polizogopoulos, their Ottawa-based attorney, said the former students are fighting the case on principle. “They were censored and discriminated against on the grounds of what they believe,” he said. “If nobody fights for these things, they never get solved.”
Lobo Shaw, who now works for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform in Calgary, agrees it would have been easier to pay the $127 trespassing fine after they were arrested in Oct. 2010 for mounting the Genocide Awareness Project, a graphic photographic exhibit comparing abortion to various genocides, including the Holocaust.
But caving in and paying the fines would have compromised the principles of Carleton LifeLine, the pro-life club she headed in her final year studying human rights at the university, she said.
“Paying those tickets would have been detrimental to us as advocates of the pre-born, as well as people of integrity,” she said. The Crown has since dropped the charges, but since Carleton asked the Ottawa police to arrest them, the lawsuit for wrongful arrest and violating their Charter rights, among other claims, is against the university, she said.
Lobo Shaw notes the YouTube video of her arrest in Oct. 2010 along with four other students shows pictures of aborted children visible on their signs in the background. “This has helped people to talk about abortion genocide.” The video has been viewed over 44,400 times.
It has also forced people to ask themselves if they need to do more, to ask why these students got arrested, she said.
The second principle at stake “is freedom of speech for all students on campus, whether prolife or not,” she said.
Abortion “certainly appears to be the most divisive political issue in Canada,” Polizogopoulos said, adding it is also a moral issue. “Politicians don’t want to comment on it and people opposed to it are labelled, censored, and shut down.”
Lobo Shaw spoke of the irony of claiming the GAP pictures are so disturbing that is not appropriate to force people to see them. “If the picture is so terrible, imagine how much more terrible the action is,” she said. “Is it appropriate that we’re forced to pay for something so terrible? Many people who are prolife are. If the picture is so terrible, why is abortion socially acceptable?”
“Generally speaking, as a prolife movement why do we expend more energy talking about how bad graphic images are and not as much time talking about how bad abortion is?” she asked.
