West Kelowna pro-life billboard removal wasn’t the goal of pro-choice activists

Both sides of the abortion debate aren’t pleased with the outcome of a dispute over billboards along the highway in West Kelowna.

The Kelowna Right to Life Society has been running a billboard next to Highway 97 for a long time, and it hasn’t always been popular. But when lawyers got involved to support a denied pro-choice billboard the company running the ad decided to take it down, and stopped running any ads related to abortion.

In the spring, teaching assistant Sophie Harms decided to start an online fundraiser to get a pro-choice billboard put up next to the highway as a response to the pro-life ad. The billboard was going read “abortion is safe, normal and common”.

“I just thought ‘let’s give it a shot and see what happens’ and then within days we raised over like $3,000. So that was really surprising. I was very excited to get this billboard published,” she told iNFOnews.ca.

When she tried to actually get the billboard, every company either turned her down or didn’t answer her.

“I took it to four companies and each of them either did not respond or they said something along the lines of, it’s too controversial and we don’t want to work with you,” she said. “I’m willing to say that it’s cowardly of them.”

When the BC Humanist Association heard about her story they decided to throw their weight behind her with a team of pro-bono lawyers.

The lawyers reached out to the billboard companies, especially BC Billboards since it was the company running the Kelowna Right to Life Society’s ad.

The association’s legal team said under the BC Human Rights Code denying Harms a pro-choice billboard while running a pro-life ad was sex discrimination since the code includes protection for pregnancy-related health impacts.

BC Billboards eventually decided to take the billboard down when the contract expired. BC Billboards declined to provide iNFOnews.ca with a comment.

This wasn’t the outcome Harms was hoping for. She wanted to give the pro-choice side of the debate even representation with the pro-life side, not remove the public messaging altogether.

“It is concerning to me that we would rather not talk about abortion at all which is further stigmatizing but I would rather have no negative messaging than, you know, negative messaging existing and nothing positive,” she said.

Marlon Bartram, the executive director of the Kelowna Right to Life Society, said everyone should have the ability to express their side of the argument.

“We welcome public debate on this issue. We believe all sides should have the ability to express their arguments and may the best ones win,” Bartram said in an emailed statement.

Ian Bushfield, the executive director of the BC Humanist Association, said sometimes it takes letters from lawyers to make things happen.

“It’s frustrating that sometimes it has to come to this because not everybody has access to legal support whether pro bono or paid,” Bushfield told iNFOnews.ca.”

Harms said she felt that prior to help from the humanist association’s legal team she wasn’t taken seriously.

“It kind of felt like who is this girl? Just like randomly contacting this business with this clunky crowdfund campaign. I don’t represent a business, I have an Instagram page, so I feel like I wasn’t really taken seriously,” she said.

She’s going to keep trying to get her pro-choice billboard put up elsewhere.

“I’m looking to see if someone who owns land would be willing to let us build our own billboard or a mass T-shirt campaign, a poster campaign, that kind of thing where we aren’t really beholden to these companies’ advertising policies,” she said.