The two Reaching Minds Through Media TV ads that ran for 13 weeks ending in early February, struck a chord with many viewers. Jakki Jeffs, Executive Director of Alliance For Life Ontario, which ran the ads, says visits to the AFLO website increased by 150 per cent while the ads were running. One ad contained the telephone number of a 24 Hour Helpline. A count of the number of people who called the line is not yet available at the time of this Halton Pro-Life blog post, but we will publish it as soon as we get it.

You can view the ads on the AFLO website.  AFLO now hopes and plans to run the ad continually in 2011.

Jakki received emails and phone calls both applauding and criticising the ads.

One ad called Hero, shows a little boy talking about his hero, his dad, who helped his mother through her pregnancy. This hit a raw nerve with a number of men, more than 20 of whom phoned Jakki to complain. These were men who, Jakki says, had failed to support their girlfriends through their pregnancies. AFLO had run this ad in 2007 and chose it again because it had had a powerful effect in encouraging men to think deeply about induced abortion.

The other, called Vanished, shows images of people vanishing - from a group of runners, a bride vanishing from a wedding - to graphically depict the one out of four people who would have been living today had they not been aborted. Many people reacted by contacting Jakki expressing disbelief. One person emailed: “I find the claim 1 in 4 children aborted exaggerated and not unlike other shock tactics you believers use . . .”

Abortions per live births

Shocking it might be but it’s not exaggerated. Statistics Canada shows

• 25.7 abortions per live births in Canada in 2006.
• 32.1 abortions per live births in 2002.
• More than half of teenage pregnancies end in abortion.

StatsCan warns that numbers have been significantly under reported since 2003:

• Many clinics have not reported.
• StatsCan reports only surgical abortions performed in hospitals and clinics. It does not report medically-induced abortions.
• StatsCan does not report abortions done on Canadian women who travelled to the U.S. for the procedure.

CHCH and CTV Aired the Ads 

They reached 97 per cent of the population of Ontario on CHCH TV and on CTV in Toronto and Kitchener. Jakki had planned to air the ads also on Omni I, Omni II and CityTV, but after the ads had been accepted by these stations, and approved by the Telecasting Bureau of Canada, an instruction came from the owner of the stations, Rogers Broadcasting, to reject Vanished. Jakki has prostested and is considering legal action.