Vancouver Right to Life also welcomes new executive director and new president

The B.C. Catholic



A pro-life society has just welcomed a new leadership team.

Vancouver Right to Life has bidden goodbye to retiring president and foundress Betty Green and welcomed a new president and executive director.

“I’m proposing this year that we regroup as a community and find our voice in Vancouver to be able to call others to join us,” said Annabelle Chong, the new executive director, at a meeting in St. Patrick’s Parish hall April 23.

Chong said Vancouver Right to Life plans to offer seminars soon to help equip pro-lifers to talk about their convictions.

“The better we can relate to people, using the full span of human relational skills that we have, the better we will be able to engage them.”

Natalie Sonnen, the group’s new president, said educational events will help the organization grow and make a difference.

“We’re in phase one of looking at how we can impact Vancouver and the culture here, and reach out to the community in ways that will be profitable for our community in raising life issues.”

Event guest speaker Peter Nation, head of Catholic Voices Canada, said it’s good to seek common values when talking with pro-choice activists.

“People who don’t believe what we believe are not demons. They are human beings who’ve got their reasons why they believe what they believe,” he said.

“Behind each question, however hostile, is a value, and it is most often a Christian value,” like compassion or mercy.

The pro-life movement has no shortage of work to do in the near future, said Pavel Reid, a well-known member of the movement.

“Over the past couple of generations in Canada, we have been sailing into a head wind, and we appear by many measures to be on the losing side of the issue,” said the archdiocesan senior director of ministries and outreach. He was also a guest speaker at the event.

“In the media, in the world of academia, and in most professions: where we were once considered one of two sides on the issue, now the pro-choice position has become dominant. We’re the kooks and the cranks.”

In addition to battling abortion, which has been available on demand since 1988, Reid said the movement is fighting on another front: assisted suicide and euthanasia.

“I’m quite confident in predicting that, just as in the case of abortion, whatever legal, financial, and regulatory restrictions are in place now to prevent suicide and euthanasia, we are very likely to face a total failure.”

Reid, speaking to about 30 Vancouver Right to Life members, high school students, and guests, suggested ways pro-lifers can face this challenge.

“We need to lawyer up. I don’t think that in the long term we are going to get very far in the courts … but in the short term, we may be able to squeeze some legal protections out of the courts.”

That, he said, requires fundraising. He said pro-lifers should also visit care homes and hospitals to provide human contact to people who are ill or dying and who might consider taking their lives early. “It doesn’t change the whole culture, but for those people whose lives are saved, it will make a big difference.”

It’s an approach that pro-lifers have been excelling at for decades, he added.

“The greatest sign of health” of the pro-life movement is “the direct assistance members give to thousands of mothers and their children, often also to fathers, to people who suffer post-abortion trauma, and to young people learning life skills that will help them avoid abortion in the first place.”

The Vancouver Right to Life Society has been around since activist Betty Green founded it in the 1980s.