Pro-Life Witness: If We Don't Do This Nobody Else Will

 

Caroline Farrow has been doing some excellent writing on the reopening of the abortion debate and the work of 40 Days for Life. Caroline, I must say, excels on the topic of abortion and nearly always manages to land some pretty heavy intellectual punches on the pro-abortion lobby. These punches will be all the more bitter to the pro-abortion lobby and its supporters because Caroline is a woman, a mother and a woman fighting for women's rights at that. One might wonder why, in an age of 'liberation', that when people talk of women's rights, people think of the right to destroy their children. Apart from having the right to become a wage slave, miss out on motherhood and destroy your children what women's rights actually exist in modern society?

 

It should not be too controversial, but in these times, when abortion is painted as a feminist issue, often in isolation, it is astonishing how few women who love their sisters are fighting for the rights of women to a more caring attitude towards pregnancy than the destruction of their children. All this is despite the obvious fact that this year highlighted the grotesque attack on women's rights not to be selected for termination simply because of their gender in the womb. Is there anything, I ask you, more sexist than that?

 

Having been in London today and spending some time at the bedside of someone I know dying of cancer (pray for him) and having been to the funeral of a woman who died young of cancer (pray for her and her family, including a brave 13-year-old boy) I ended up in Whitfield Street where I prayed for an hour with some of those keeping vigil outside Marie Stopes in shifts for an ongoing 24-hour a day vigil throughout the 40 Days for Life. Having blogged about it, I felt I shouldn't ask people to do anything I wasn't prepared to do myself and it was only a couple of stops away on the tube.

 

Nobody could accuse us of 'harrassing women' (yes, we were five men) since it was 10pm and Marie Stopes had shut up shop for the night long before I got there. At this time, the vigil is simply prayer, as it is, I believe the vast majority of the time. Five of us stood in the rain with brollies praying the Divine Mercy and Rosary. Despite the fact that Marie Stopes was closed for the night, I was there long enough for a man with a friend to walk past telling me to stop saying my 'fake prayers' (does he have the gift of reading souls?) and that we should all get lost and stop harrassing and 'intimidating' women.

Yet, it seems to me that pro-life witness is a bit like the experience of beggars. A beggar could be sitting down outside a shop and one minute a man comes up and give him a quid and say, 'There you go, get yourself something', and the next minute he could face the onslaught of a group of lads who want to beat him up for fun. There are people with sympathy and those who have little or the opposite. Beggars take the rough with the smooth because they have to, appalling as that is in a so called civilised society. As it happens, just a little way along Whitfield Street, we saw a homeless man sleeping out rough in a sleeping bag. We gave him some coffee.

So, it will come as no surprise that prior to this another man walked past with and told us that he totally agreed with what we were doing and we had his support. Then, as we prayed the Rosary we were approached by three Catholics who said that while we had their 'total respect' and that we had their prayers that they wondered if this was the most effective way of raising the profile of this issue - in this specific place.

They expressed concern that we were men. I replied that I had known someone who discovered his partner had aborted his child and it sent him into the depths of despair. It ended their relationship. I also explained that women were among those keeping vigil at other times. We talked at length about the morality of this kind of witness. They said that for most people, some people standing outside an abortion clinic with beads would make people think we were lunatics. I politely replied that St Francis and his followers were deemed at the time to be lunatics, as were the Apostles by many, even in more religious times.

 

One said that Jesus did not stand around with placards making people feel uncomfortable and that Our Lord had treated St Mary Magdalen with so much compassion and yet here were were, Catholics, standing around praying about abortion which could hurt the feelings of women who have had abortion. They might, he said, feel judged. I certainly have some sympathy with this viewpoint, but what I tried to communicate was that this issue is simply too big to ignore for a society which campaigns relentlessly for 'human rights'. It might, for instance, offend arms manufacturers when people protest against the dropping of cluster bombs on innocent civilians or develop drones that kill indiscriminately. That does not stop people being right about being witnesses to a campaign against this evil.

 

Women, as well as men, join these vigils not to judge or condemn women who have or have had abortions but to be a witness to the sanctity of human life. With 200,000 abortions performed a year in the UK, is it not about time that people stood up and said, 'Enough! Stop the bloodshed!' even if this is done in public by some people with brollies outside a clinic? Pro-life witness is not a witness of condemnation, but of witnessing to the sanctity of human life in the womb. Life is sacred. It may not look particularly great to do that - it may offend some, but Our Lord certainly offended many. A pro-life witness does not judge people - it endeavours to offer hope to those in dire circumstances, with the help of good charities like the Good Counsel Network, and to say to all who walk past and those in the industry that all human life is sacred.

 

I also found time (I was in talkative mood) to tell them that Marie Stopes International were exporting this to all of Africa as a population control measure, backed by an IMF and World Bank who refuse to give aid to countries that don't accept it! I told them about the evil beliefs of the founder of this frankly criminal organisation, a charity, who clearly still retain the beliefs of their founder that blacks need to be stopped from breeding because they are, by these eugenicists, deemed to be inferior races. I told them of the relentless pursuit of money which drives this charity, funded by government and the Rockefeller clan in abundance to perform this exercise in population control across not just the UK, but the West and overseas. These three men were three of the cleanest cut looking sceptical-of-pro-life-witness Catholics who assured us of their prayers I've seen, by the way. I do hope we were entertaining Angles, rather than Angels, otherwise I spent a good 25 minutes lecturing Angels.

 

Justice

While the Good Counsel Network scrapes by in order to clothe, feed and shelter the most deprived and desperate mothers in crisis who need their help, the Rockefeller Foundation, among others like the Population Council, the UN, the Bill and Melinda Gates and Ford Foundations, continue to pour their millions into spreading child destruction across the globe. Meanwhile, the Marie Stopes clan profit out of the destruction of children, families and the lives of women who often harbour feelings of guilt and despair which only emerge often years after the abortion event. This charity, Marie Stopes is rolling in money - I told them to look up what the Chief Executives of these abortion mills are paid - if they can find it - while charities like Good Counsel (who actually want to give concrete help to expectant mothers, rather than doing away with their child and sending them out of the door) are always desperate for any funds that come their way.

 

Where is the justice in that? With the millions that the British Government spend on spreading contraception, abortion and war across the World, I expect, if some money was diverted in the way of mothers (and fathers) struggling to accept new life that they could, in fact, make the UK a happier place. But no. This is far too 'revolutionary' a concept for even the most leftist of Governments. Our Government is far happier to use this undeclared warfare against its own people in the womb, to pay for it and to line the pockets of those with the blood of the innocent on their hands for doing it. So, too, are the billionaires of the World, while they sit in their mansions musing on the fact that, for them, there are still too many people on the planet! With the millions spent on abortion by Government and the other millions spent by the billionaire club on the cause of aborting the children of the poor, maybe, just maybe, if this were instead turned towards coming to the genuine aid of those in crisis pregnancies, the Good Counsel Network coffers would be full to overflowing and women could get the real shelter, food, clothing and prams necessary for raising children.

 

Just as an aside to that, recall that in Libya, Colonel Gadaffi, the evil bogeyman portrayed by the West actually paid families a very generous reward for having children. He may have been a mad dictator, but at least he wasn't doing away with his own innocent citizens in the womb.

 

This may not be the generation that ends abortion in the United Kingdom but we may not be light years away. Despite what one or two politicians have said which gives us cause for hope, the British State is happy with abortion rates as they are. It is a State at war with its own people for reasons which we may never understand this side of Heaven. What the powerful fear is an electorate that understand we are being enslaved and that abortion is an essential part of that agenda. What the Establishment fears is an electorate that becomes so sick and tired of the relentless culture of death propagated by those in power that it begins to see that a pro-life witness is just that - a resistance formed by men and women who refuse to remain silent or acquiescent in the deliberate killing of one of our countrymen or anyone else, male, or female, in the womb - the place where human life - and citizenship - begins! Who will be the conscience of the nation that will defend the sanctity of life? These vigils serve a good purpose, because if we, Catholics, and all of good will don't defend the unborn in prayer and word and deed, if we don't do this, nobody else will!

How long will it be before we have pro-life mendicants for the Lord, suffering for Christ and the unborn, sleeping outside Marie Stopes in sleeping bags, taking shifts to pray?  What an idea! You first, though. I insist...

 

 

That which is now part of British heritage can

just as easily become a part of Britain's past...