(LifeSiteNews) — LifeSiteNews co-founder Steve Jalsevac recently sat down to interview Jim Hughes, pro-life activist for over 40 years and former president of the Campaign Life Coalition (CLC), to discuss his experience in the pro-life movement.
Hughes recalls first getting involved in the pro-life movement in the mid-1970s when his wife, a registered nurse, asked him if he was going to get involved in pro-life work and invited him to see a presentation by the Toronto Right to Life at the Canadian National Exhibition. Recalling the presentation, he told Jalsevac that he “couldn’t believe that you could kill a child, a preborn child, right up until the time it would be born.” While his wife told him that he should take a couple of years off from his regular work – work that in two years allowed him to make over $100,000 – Hughes would go on to spend the following decades in the pro-life movement, the year after the exhibition attending the Tiniest Humans Conference in Toronto.
Discussing other motivations that got him involved in the pro-life movement, Hughes spoke to how he and his wife lost two of their first three children when they were still infants. He recalled that he did not speak about the loss of the first child often – something that caused him enough stress to speak to a therapist.
Hughes recalled how he once walked the boardwalk in Toronto pushing one of his surviving children in a stroller after the first loss, at which point the thought occurred to him that God loved him and that he loved God, and that he had nothing to worry about and that his lost child was with God. “I turned around and went back home, returned a number of phone calls that I was putting off and went back to doing my work,” he recalled. Unlike his first loss, when he lost the third child, Hughes “let it all hang out like a normal person would do,” and “got over” the loss quickly.
Hughes never forgot the lost children, he said.
“When I’m at church, at church services, I thank God for my children and I name the two that I lost, as well as the ones that survived and we’re blessed to have,” he told Jalsevac. “And then with the six grandchildren we had, and I praise God all the time for that, too. So it’s been a wonderful thing because they’re part and parcel of our family, despite the fact that we didn’t get to enjoy the time with them when they were here on earth.”
When Jalsevac said that everyone in the pro-life movement has a backstory, Hughes recounted how young people in the CLC’s offices came to him one summer and told him that they have problems, to which he laughed and said that everyone in the office did, but that they carry their crosses and learned how to “cope” with them – something that they will also learn how to do.
READ: Canadian physicians group backs down from plan to force participation in euthanasia, abortion
“The last prayer I say every morning is, ‘Lord, thank you for allowing me to do your work today,’” Hughes said about the possibility of a calling to the pro-life movement. He also told Jalsevac about how a woman asked him at his church how he felt after he “wasted” four decades of his life as the chairman of the CLC having just retired, telling her, “Every day was a gift from God to be able to do this work, and I leave it up to Him. I go and do the best I can, and any judgment on how successful or negative my actions were, it’s up to Him. He’ll judge them.”
“That’s what’s kept me going, together with so many wonderful people I’ve met in the pro-life movement, not just in Canada, but in the United States and abroad,” said Hughes, calling it a “mind-blowing thing” to get adrenaline daily considering that there is an “army” of people that think the same way about “the issues,” and that it is “wonderful to be part of it” as opposed to doing pro-life work alone.
When he was eventually elected as chairman of CLC Toronto, he admitted that he was not fond of doing interviews, fearing that he would make a mistake due to ignorance on the issue. Normally, he would send someone else to do the interview on his behalf during his first year as chairman. Even so, he learned a good deal from interactions with the people he met in the pro-life movement, including Venerable Jerome Lejeune, the man who discovered the extra chromosome in people with Down Syndrome, William Lilley, the man who developed the ultrasound, Laura MacArthur of the Toronto Right to Life, and others.
He also managed to interact with several prominent abortionists while involved in the pro-life movement, including Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the men behind the abortion movement and an eventual pro-life activist and Catholic convert.
Recalling a story Nathanson told him in a Washington, D.C. coffee shop, Hughes related that Nathanson once walked into St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York on a hot, humid day to escape the heat in the middle of a Mass, and two of the people at the Mass, a young couple, turned around and told him, “The peace of Christ, Dr. Nathanson.”
Hughes also told Jalsevac about how he once organized a debate between Nathanson and notorious abortionist Henry Morgentaler on Canadian television after accepting the invitation himself. When asked by Jalsevac what the censorship of the pro-life argument was like in Canada at the time of the debate, Hughes recalled that the Canadian Television Network (CTV) would not allow pictures of preborn infants appear on television, calling them “pornographic,” and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) likewise did not want to run CLC’s commercials. Only CHCH out of Hamilton took them, a network he described as “fair” and “prepared to present the truth.”
Discussing pro-life work that he did, Hughes recalls that when he first attended a Campaign Life event, he noted that the organization was going to work “in the political realm,” and volunteered to lead it. While the group was holding a fundraiser, Hughes noticed that there were about 200 names on their mailing list. When he asked people to add to the list everyone to whom they sent a Christmas card, the list expanded to about 8,000. “And all of a sudden we had this whole group of people out there, hundreds of people ready to support us,” he recalled.
The group also profiled candidates for political office, with people at provincial offices telling the national office about people that were running locally. The candidates would be vetted by three people at the national office upon the completion of a two-question survey designed by Chesterton scholar Father Ian Boyd, and the survey asked if the candidates supported abortion in every possible case and if they would support legislation defunding organizations that support abortion. Hughes also recalled how he managed to change several politicians’ opinions on abortion.
Recalling one instance, he and another pro-lifer met a Member of Parliament (MP) at a restaurant in downtown Toronto, who proceeded to tell them about his misgivings about two aspects of CLC’s position. Hughes managed to get the MP to agree to review the information Hughes had for him by the end of their meal, and the MP eventually called Hughes to tell him that he now agreed with CLC. The now-former MP remains a member of CLC’s national board.
Hughes further spoke to the original pro-life caucus in the Canadian Parliament, formed by Conservative Elsie Wayne, Reformer Jason Kenney and Liberal Tom Wappel. The three would co-chair the caucus, rotating as president of caucus meetings every month, and the Business for Life group would pay for meals at any meetings of the group in Ottawa hotels, which it did until about six years ago.
“It was wonderful to … be able to sit down with the Liberals and Conservatives in the same room who had this fundamental agreement on human life,” Hughes recalled. “And it was wonderful to have these discussions with them, proposed different types of legislation, etc., that this one would present over here so that the party in power could say, ‘Well, it’s over there on that side,’ but it was really a collaboration of the two parties that were there.”
Several members of the caucus spoke at the Canadian March for Life, which Nellie Gray convinced Hughes to start in Canada, though Hughes posited that the “powers that be … orchestrating this anti-life movement, anti-family movement” that sought to remove parents’ input in their children’s education “saw to it that there would be no major opposition.”
“I can remember the Prime Minister of Canada, John Chretien, saying at one point, ‘You tell the white bearded guy in Toronto he doesn’t run the Liberal Party, I do,’” recounted Hughes, adding that Chretien “parachuted” five of his own candidates, including a retired Catholic school principal, in ridings where pro-lifers would be nominated to run for election. Jalsevac noted that Preston Manning, head of the Reform Party, eventually did this. Hughes responded that he was a good man, recounting a story that Manning held a town hall on euthanasia where his own constituents shocked him by voicing their support for it, and Hughes told him he should have educated them on the issue first.
Hughes and Jalsevac further discussed the issues in the Catholic Church related to life issues. Hughes had been a member of the Archdiocese of Toronto’s pastoral council before entering the pro-life movement.
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Early in the interview, Hughes recalled that Archbishop Philip Pocock of Toronto asked him in 1973 how archdiocesan laity would react if he opted to remove the Council of Catholic Charities from the United Way over the group’s support for Planned Parenthood. When Hughes asked Pocock and another priest in the meeting what the archdiocese’s priests thought, both were silent. Responding to Pocock’s question, Hughes opined that if the archbishop framed the decision in the way that he did for Hughes, they would accept the decision. And they did.
Later in the interview, Hughes told Jalsevac that Pocock’s decision was a “gutsy move,” since he did not have the support of other bishops or of the clergy. Meanwhile, other priests would call Pocock “Phil the Pill,” believing him to be “soft on the birth control issue.” Hughes recalled a conversation he and Pocock had about Humanae vitae, St. Paul VI’s condemnation of birth control, and the Winnipeg Statement, an ambiguous statement by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops regarding the condemnation, in which Pocock said that he was acting on the advice given to him – advice given him by Father Gregory Baum, a convert to the Catholic faith who eventually left the priesthood, married a former nun, and admitted to having a homosexual lover, all the while voicing criticism of Humanae vitae.
“If I disagreed with a bishop or an archbishop, a cardinal, even the Pope, then people would say to me, ‘What do you think of this?’ I’d say, ‘Well, I actually pray to his Boss, and that’s how I get through it all,’” Hughes told Jalsevac. “I know what is involved here.”
“Of course, around all of these politicians, around all of these clergy, are people they trust, because they trust them for various reasons,” Hughes continued. “And so when it comes to this issue, they trust them on this issue as well, only to find out too late that those people are not onside.”
When Jalsevac asked Hughes what advice he would give to a newly appointed bishop, Hughes said that he would warn him. Recalling one instance regarding his dealings with a Canadian archbishop, Hughes related that he told the archbishop that not everyone around him was orthodox, much to the archbishop’s disbelief. Hughes then told the archbishop an episode dealing with his immediate predecessor, how he once sought papers given him by the CLC that were thrown in the garbage, among other things that gave “the opposition” reason to believe the archbishop did not support the CLC.
Looking back on his time in the pro-life movement, Hughes maintained that while he is no longer chair of the CLC, he is still involved in the pro-life fight because of the amount of evil in the world. “I feel if God comes to call me tomorrow, I don’t want him to find me sitting on my duff while all this terrible stuff is happening,” he said. “I want Him to find me still doing battle.”
Recalling having written about his experiences in the pro-life movement, Hughes told Jalsevac that prayer is “the fundamental thing,” without which he would not have had the ability to focus on his work.
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He recalled prayer’s power by recounting how after 1988 an atheist was in his office and that there was almost a “terrible law” passed in Canada, and the atheist asked Hughes why he was negative about the issue and resort to turning his “God power on.” Hughes agreed, and the law, C-43, a law that masqueraded as a pro-life law, failed to pass the Canadian Senate. Having opposed the law, Hughes said that people, including Catholic clergy, attacked pro-life activists over their stance on the law.
Hughes also observed that pro-lifers themselves are always supported by someone close to them, whether it be a spouse or a sibling, and supportive of one another, using his time sleeping in another pro-lifer’s basement as an example. He recalled that when he was staying in the basement of pro-life activist Mary Wagner’s home when she was young, her mother called to the family that their dog should not be let in the basement where Hughes was staying.
Hughes also observed that pro-lifers tend to be people of faith, though not exclusively, recalling a time he spoke with someone at a restaurant with pro-life views who was an atheist. Hughes also noted that there was a time when CLC had three women working for it who had had abortions, saying, “We were all together because, you see, we realized that God created each one of us in his own image and likeness. So even with the most notorious abortionist, we could still have a conversation.”
At another point in the interview, Hughes spoke to the importance of being nonjudgmental with women who have had abortions, recalling those three women. He framed the conversation as though a woman came up to him and said he would not like her because of a prior abortion. Hughes said that he would love her, as both were created the same way, and offer her a job application.
Speaking about being “harsh” on people in general, Hughes discussed a hypothetical conversation in which someone would say that the preborn baby is part of a woman’s body, to which he would ask if it were possible for a woman to have two blood types (most children having different blood types than their mothers), or if she could show them her umbilical cord.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of Steve Jalsevac’s interview with Jim Hughes.