“Truly the first victim in abortion, the first victim in sin, is God,” he said. “It is He who is wounded. There is no such thing as a victimless crime.”

On April 5 Nicholson addressed about 100 people as the second day of Campaign Life Coalition’s National Pro-Life Conference got underway. Nicholson stressed that abortion represents an evil that extends beyond the killing of God’s unborn children. That evil is the absence and rejection of a belief in God which is used to rationalize the act of abortion itself.

“What we are handling when we are dealing with this great sin of abortion, what the Second Vatican Council calls an abomination, is the sentence of a far greater evil,” he said. “We may look at the age of abortion and say how can anything be any worse than the slaughter of little children, the pulling of limb from limb, the shattering of little skulls. The truth is there is a far graver evil and that is to believe that there is no God and that there is no eternal life and that there is no consequence of sin.”

Towards the end of his talk, Nicholson, a missionary preacher of the new evangelization from the Diocese of London, Ont., noted that evils are often connected by making reference to the frequency in which acts of sodomy and the use of contraception are used. This relationship is often overlooked and hurts the pro-life movement.

“One of the things that we can easily fall into is that while we are trying to battle one grave evil that they are not all connected,” he said.

Jim Hughes, president of Campaign Life Coalition, admits to not only overlooking this relationship in the early days of the pro-life movement but actually supporting one of the evils by promoting contraception — a true error in the effort to end abortion in Canada.

“In the early days of the pro-life movement, in Toronto at least when I got involved 35 years ago ... we saw that contraception was not that answer to stopping abortion as a lot of us thought at the time,” said Hughes. “We found that really the contraception mentality in many cases led directly to abortion.”

Hughes said that can be sourced back to the progressive deterioration of the nation’s faith which continues to function as a hurdle for the movement. 

“People forget that the spiritual element is at the core of everything that we do,” he said. “People tend to give up and say that we can’t really do anything. (But) it is not up to us to judge that, it is up to us to just be faithful in what we are doing, continue to plow on and in the end the good Lord will keep tabs on whether or not we were successful.”

That message was echoed by Carter Grant, a 20-year-old who attended the conference.

“This isn’t our battle, it is the Lord’s battle, we are just called to keep working,” said the Ryerson University student. “Even if we don’t see the results right now it doesn’t mean that there won’t be results later on. It is not our job, it is not our purpose to know what our actions will result in. It is our job to keep going and working and answering the call of the Lord.”

Hughes said seeing people who represent the next generation of pro-life activists like Carter is inspiring for those like himself who represent the roots of the movement.

“They are full of enthusiasm, they’re eager to learn and we’ve assembled a good stable of speakers to inspire them with the truth,” he said. “The pro-life movement is alive and growing.”

Among these speakers were Dan Zeilder, president of Family Life Council, Janet Morana, president of Priests for Life, and international pro-life speaker Rebecca Kiessling.

For Carter surrounding himself with so many other pro-lifers helped to rejuvenate his own dedication to the cause.

“When you are by yourself for a long time or in your community of about five, six or seven people and we are working constantly, you can get discouraged because you are not getting as many people as you would like,” he said. “But then when you come together in these big conferences with a big number of people you realize how many pro-life people there actually is and they are not that far away from you. You can rejuvenate yourself with the people around you.”