"A person is a person, no matter how small!" Horton the elephant keeps insisting in Dr. Zeuss's classic children's book, Horton Hears a Who. Horton believes something others don't: that a world full of people live on a miniscule speck he found. He believes that because he heard their mayor, calling for help. Horton takes on the rescue challenge, because in his eyes, "a person is a person, no matter how small."
Horton would have gotten on well with early 20th Century author and activist Nellie McClung. Women couldn't vote in Canada - until Nellie. Nor could they own property or have a bank account. Canadian law didn't consider them persons.
That changed in 1929, thanks to Nellie and four other women. Canada's Famous Five, as they're now known, lobbied relentlessly to see women established in law as persons. Today on Ottawa's Parliament Hill you'll find a sculpture of the women - a larger than life-sized tableau. They're sipping tea, wondering perhaps, what next.
While visiting the Hill recently, I touched Nellie's sun-warmed bronze coat, grateful for the reminder of how she lived out her unflinching convictions. "Never retreat. Never explain. Never apologize," she said often. And in the face of jeers and opposition, Nellie and her companions kept their face to the truth. In doing so, they earned themselves a permanent place on the Hill and in history.
People remember Nellie as a women's rights activist. I peg her as an advocate for human life - deep respect for life was foundational to her work and writing. Were she still living, I suspect she'd march again on Parliament Hill every year, just before Mother's Day. Striving, this time, to bring attention to the personhood of another segment of society; the smallest among us - our children, still in the womb.
Perhaps she'd speak loudly: Current Canadian law has no restriction against abortion at any stage. Government refuses to condemn even the specific targeting of female babies for sex-selective abortion. Furthermore, it doesn't officially recognize a child in the womb as a person.
Nellie can't attend, but on May 9th, thousands of others will meet on the Hill at this year's annual March for Life. In 2012, twenty thousand people gathered there to remind Canada's lawmakers that all human life is sacred; that political correctness must be cast aside in deference to truth, and that our pre-born children must be defended.
From conception to death, human life is a gift from God. Beautiful. Worthy. Intrinsically valuable. In coffee shops, letters, pulpits and on social media let's remind each other that we must do what we can to value and protect it. Nellie would do that. Horton would too.
(By the way Horton Hears a Who is now also a kids' movie - one of the Beans' and my favourite.)
