Tuesday 9 December 2014

Picket Lines

Picketing is not something that the mainstream British pro-life organisations (which, being full of Catholics, are full of Labour voters and disproportionately of Labour Party members) really do, anyway.

This rather un-British behaviour attracts adverse publicity to the cause, but it is not very common over here. 

It has been imported from, and largely by, the American lot, a spectacularly unsuccessful movement which in 2012 was reduced to urging a vote for a Presidential candidate who derived an income from the public funding of abortion in the state where he had legalised such funding.

By contrast, abortion is specifically excluded from Obamacare. But don't try and tell that to the GOP shills and hacks of American pro-life.

Or to their basically foreign mouthpieces on certain newspapers that are so far removed from the culture of this country as to imagine Catholicism to be a predominantly Southern, public school, Tory pursuit. Or the Conservative Party to be basically pro-life.

Don't hold your breath for the ban, though. That would raise far too many questions about the activities of trade unionists, peace activists, environmentalists, and so on.

The second and third of whom are now less likely to vote Labour than pro-life activists are, and far less likely to be Labour Party members.

7 comments:

  1. How is this worse than picketing in a strike?

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    1. These women are in a very vulnerable position. I don't agree with what they are doing, but the fact that they are doing it proves that they are at a very low ebb.

      I am not keen on banning this kind of thing, and I don't think that that will happen. But I wouldn't encourage it.

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  2. It's a fine line I think David. What is your answer to an organisation like the Good Counsel Network who do not 'picket' in the same way as an organisation like Abort 67, but rather silently stand and pray in an act of witness?

    If you speak to the members of the Good Counsel Network, they will testify that these vigils offer the only opportunity for women to be offered a very real and viable alternative to abortion and that indeed the majority of their clients are women on the margins, such as immigrants who qualify for no benefits and feel that they have no actual choice.

    Done correctly, vigils outside abortion clinics really do save and transform lives, so I think we need to be very clear about what kind of tactics we are condemning.

    Also I think you need to remember that many vigils take place at weekends when the clinics are not actually open. Many women such as myself wish that the kind of advice and support on offer to women, only available on the clinic doorstep, had been there for us when we felt we had no other choice than to have an abortion.

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    1. Prayer and picketing are two different things. They do have a lot of, sometimes quite surprising, shared history. But they are distinct.

      It is difficult to see how this law could be framed effectively at all. But it is quite impossible to see how it could ever ban silent prayer, and the simple answering of the question, "What are you doing?"

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  3. This government closed down the abortion consultation because it didn't care what anybody thought. A Tory minister, Soubry, not a Lib Dem. That matters far more than setting up these buffer zones that probably wouldn't stand up in court, anyway.

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    1. In After The Party, a collection of reminisces published in 2011 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Andrew Pearmain writes:

      "I started sleeping with other women on my trips to London, other Communist students and even a Tory member of the NUS Executive whose taste for rough sex really shocked me; she later joined the SDP."

      Well, she is not in the SDP, or even (indeed, ever) the Lib Dems, now...

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    2. If anyone bans this it will be the Tories. No trade unionists, environmentalists or peace activists there. Few Catholic/Muslim voters, very few Evangelical/Pentecostal ones, next to none from black churches. Proven record of shutting down debate on abortion. Extreme social liberal record from Thatcher on abortion up to birth, to Cameron on gay marriage, even New Labour never came close.

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