Meet Joe Borowski.

When a lad of 18 or so, my dad worked in a pulp mill in Prince Rupert, B.C. One night, while standing in the coat-check line after a dance, he was pushed aside by a burly youth who, wanted to get to the front of the queue. Dad stiffened and held his ground, the man spun him around, and their eyes met. A challenge flickered in the air-then his friends precipitously intervened, and spirited my father away.

"Don't mess with him!" they said, "That's Joe Borowski!"

Thus, many years later when a certain Joe Borowski achieved prominence--or some would say, notoriety--by resigning his cabinet post in Manitoba over abortion, my father wondered if this was the same man as the young rowdy with the piercing eyes, with whom one did not mess. That Joe Borowski, my dad recalled, gave one the sense that his was to be no ordinary life.

It was indeed the same man, but Joe had traveled far since those days when, he rambled through the bush camps and mines of Ontario and B.C.

When, at age 37, he resigned as NDP highways minister in September 1971, because of provincial funding for abortions committed in the States, Joe Borowski had already achieved folk hero status in Manitoba as a man, revered for his unassailable integrity.

As a union member, he fought for better working conditions in the mining town of Thompson. He camped on the steps of the legislature to petition for self-government for that same town. He camped on legislature steps yet again to protest cabinet pay increases and for an increased minimum wage. And when the hated sales tax came to Manitoba in 1967, Joe, then running a souvenir shop in Thompson, refused to collect it and went to jail, briefly, three times. This is what the public knew of Joe when he ran as an NDP candidate in the provincial election of 1969.

And he was a newspaperman's dream. He stirred up controversy, said what he thought, said, in fact, what a lot of people thought but wouldn't necessarily say--and he was always, always, good copy. "It's funny, every time I make a statement, there's always some donkey around asking for an apology," he remarked at a press conference.

But it was when he came face to face with his government's complicity with abortion that Joe Borowski met his destiny. It was to protect the most weak, those who, in the words of the Holy Father, lack even "that minimal form of defence consisting in the poignant power of a newborn baby's cries and tears" (Evangelium vitae, 58) that this powerful man with the rough-and-ready tongue, the ready and sometimes rueful grin and the steady, wide-open heart would spend the rest of his strength.

Why is it important to tell Joe's story--aside from the obvious fact that it is such a good story, recalling as it does a Greek tragedy? It is because Joe lived the Gospel of life; he accepted without reserve the "inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life" (Ev, 28)--a choice we all must make.

He refused to cooperate with an abortion regime by not filing his income tax, and paid the consequences with trials, arrest and incarceration. He pushed his body--and his family--to the limit of endurance when he embarked on a 90-day fast to protest the exclusion of the unborn child from Charter protection in 1981. But it was his court challenge on behalf of unborn children, fought through the cruelly labyrinthine ways of the Canadian judicial system to the Supreme Court-over a period of 11 years and at an estimated total cost of at least $750,000--for which Joe Borowski will best be remembered.

But when the right to life is denied by "parliamentary vote, or the will of one part of the people--even if it is the majority" then, as John Paul II warns us, "democracy, contradicting its own principles, effectively moves towards a form of totalitarianism. The State is no longer the 'common home' where all can live together on the basis of principles of fundamental equality, but is transformed into a tyrant State" (Ev 20).

Joe's quest could not have been accomplished by a group or committee, but only by an individual of unswerving resolution. It failed, but the attempt had to be made. Now we see, without illusion, just what we face: a culture of death the roots of which run so deep as to pervert democracy, and corrupt the rule of law. After Joe died in 1996, his widow, Jean, found--scattered on fences, tree branches, and in nooks all over the acreage outside Winnipeg where she and Joe had lived for 25 years--hundreds of rosaries. On his frequent evening walks, Joe wanted to sure of one within reach.

If not for his deep faith, the travails Joe Borowski endured would have crushed a spirit more indomitable than his, and broken a heart even more generous. Only sustained by the blood of Christ, from which "all draw the strength to commit themselves to promoting life" (Ev 25), could Joe repeat with the Apostle Paul, "Oh death, where is your victory, oh death, where is your sting?"

Lianne Laurence is a freelance writer working on a biography of this pro-life champion.