17 April 2012

Abort Abort67 - Defend the Right to Abortion & a Woman’s Right to Choose
















Pro-Choice Demonstration Outside Bigots' Church Service

For some months, a group called Abort 67 has been picketting Wiston’s Clinic on the border of Brighton and Hove. Wiston’s carry out early termination of pregnancy for women who choose not to have a child as well as vasectomies for men.

Abort67 is a group which advocates the tactics of anti-abortion campaigners in the United States, who regularly picket abortion clinics and have murdered doctors and medical staff who work there.

For some reason these 'born again' fundamentalist ‘Christians’ call themselves ‘pro-Life’ which is why they are endorsed and supported by people like Texas Governor Rick Perry and all the other loonies of the American Right. Being ‘pro-life’ doesn’t stop one from also being ‘pro-death’ – Texas being the Death Penalty Capital of the USA.

You’ll be hard pressed to find many Black faces amongst the fundies, because of course the Bible Belt of the USA, from where these white trash churches have their roots, is also the birthplace of Segregation, Jim Crow Laws and the Ku Klux Klan.

Perhaps what is most disgusting about these people is their exploitation of the misery of others. The Holocaust provides them with a fertile field. They hold that Abortion is equivalent to the holocaust. In fact the equivalent of Abort67 and the other pro-Lifers were the ‘German Christians’ - Baptists and Evangelical Protestants all, with Hitler. The only exception to this was the small and relatively ineffectual Confessing Church whose main concern was the autonomy of the Church vs the Nazi Party. What they don't publicise is that the Nazi regime made procuring an abortion for an 'Aryan' woman a capital offence. On the other hand Jewish, Gypsy and similarly ‘racially inferior’ women were forced to have abortions. The purpose of German Christians was to breed for race and nation and Abort67 would have been most welcome in German Christian circles and in the Reich Church headed by Bishop Muller.

Far from those supporting a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, or not, having anything in common with the perpetrators of the holocaust, that accolade belongs with Abort67 and those, like the Worthing Jubilee Church, that supports them.

Last Sunday we decided to give our righteous Christians of the Worthing Jubilee Church a taste of their own medicine. They didn’t seem to like it as they scurried past lock gates or tried to slip in the back way. About 50 of us, complete with sound system and megaphone, let the people of Worthing know about the true nature of the Jubilee Christians.

It should of course be mentioned that Abort67 and all the other ‘Christian’ hypocrites, have nothing to say about back-street and illegal abortions. They would be quite happy for the position prior to 1967 to exist again. Then women who didn’t have money and influence were forced to risk their lives, and many did lose their lives, in order that the ‘sanctity of life’ of the foetus could be preserved.

These 'Christians' are the same ones who are rabid supporters of Zionism and the Jewish 'return' to Palestine. According to Pastor John Hagee, of the Southern Baptist Convention, Hitler and the Nazis were merely fulfilling god's will. They were merely god's messenger boys, sent to drive the Jews to Palestine, when the battle of Armageddon could begin. True most of the Jews would be wiped out, but a few would, with the Christian Elect, rise to heaven to the tune of heavenly choirs.

But then the whole politics of the Christian Right in the USA serve as a form of legitimation of war. These are the same Christians who are urging a holy war against Iran. Protestant fundamentalists in the US worked flat out to secure the election of George Bush – a ‘born again’ Christian – who waged a war in Iraq that cost of 1 million lives. They had earlier secured the Guatemalan Presidency for a fellow Protestant fundamentalist Efrain Rios Montt, whose state forces murdered, tortured, raped and pillaged, killing some 200,000 people – mainly Mayan Indians – in the battle against ‘communism’. Montt, who has now been arraigned in Guatemala, has been complaining of an abuse of his rights as a defendant! Montt was a creature of the US Southern Fundamentalists in a country that is largely Catholic. The ‘pro-life’ movement has been conspicuous by its silence when it comes to real holocausts and genocide.

Opposition to abortion, contraception and gay rights is common to the fundamentalist Christian churches in the US and in Britain. It revolves around their conception of the nature of the family and traditional patriarchal structures. Sexual freedom, which includes the right to control one’s own body, contradicts the traditional view of the family as one dominated by the man. That is and always has been the root of religious opposition to abortion. It has nothing whatsoever to do with being ‘pro-life’.

In fact even the Catholic Church used to have a concept of ‘delayed ensoulment’. It wasn’t until about 3 months into the pregnancy that a human soul was held to be present and many held it was only when there was sign of movement in the foetus, about 5 months into the pregnancy. Sterilisation was held to be a greater sin Indeed the Archbishop of Florence Antoninus supported abortion as a means of saving life. He was later made a saint! See ‘The Moderate Roman Catholic Position on Contraception and Abortion’ by Professor Daniel Maguire, a Catholic theologian at Marquette University.

The Jewish religion certainly doesn’t hold that abortion is the equivalent of murder, since it is allowed if the woman’s life is in danger or because of incest or rape. If it was indeed murder then none of these exceptions would be allowed. Thus opposition to abortion is not and never has been a religious issue per se, in fact the Catholic Church said remarkably little about abortion for 15 centuries. Its main concern was over infanticide, which was used instead of contraception or abortion.

See also a Petition to withdraw support from Abort67, a Brighton pro-choice campaign set up in opposition to Abort's tactics, a UK wide campaign, coverage in the local Worthing Herald and The Argus.

What was encouraging yesterday morning in sleepy conservative Worthing was the amount of support we got from passing motorists honking their horns. Indeed there were no hostile comments apart from the congregants of Jubilee Church itself.

Tony Greenstein


8 comments:

  1. I find it hard to believe the allegation that Abort 67 advocates the murder doctors and medical staff who work in the abortion industry.

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  2. I didn't say that Abort67 supports (or openly supports) the murder of doctors and nurses, but it comes from the same poisoned well as those who do. The activist anti-abortion movement in the USA who believe that killing a doctor saves thousands of unborn children.

    Does not Abort67 compare abortion to the holocaust? The implications are obvious. Wouldn't it have been right to kill Hitler and his henchmen to save millions? The logic is inescapable.

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  3. jock mctrousers17 April 2012 at 22:55

    That particular church may be mostly white, but I've read reports that the Evangelical movement is making its biggest inroads in the UK in black communities, particularly recent African immigrants. And that coincides with my experience of my local evangelical church, whose membership is almost exclusively black. Several of them have accosted me in the street to " explain about Israel" to me, because I was wearing a Free Palestine badge; you can imagine: " God gave Israel to the Jews until HE comes back..." I try to explain to them that their church is run by the sort of people that run the Ku Klux Klan, but of course they've never heard of the Klan, and anyway you might as well argue with pigeons.

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  4. Your argument doesn't sound at all logical to me. I think you are adding two and two and getting seven, so-to-speak.

    Why don't you enter into dialogue with Abort 67? You could attempt to persuade its leaders that the movement against it of which Abort 67 is a part, is a reactionary movement beloved of the bourgeoisie and contrary to the interests of the working class.

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  5. My maths John is a little better than you credit me for. You appear to have difficulty following my logic. Here goes.

    Abort67 equate abortion to the holocaust, when 6m or so Jews died. Now if I had had the opportunity, with the hindsight, I would have gladly executed the Nazi leadership. Given that these people say that millions of 'babies' are being murdered, isn't the logic inexorable? Never mind basic arithmetic just try logic.

    As for entering into dialogue with them. Since these people aren't working class, or in the USA they are the unorganised 'poor whites' with a class consciousness which blames those worse off than themselves, dialogue with such elements is a complete waste of time. They are happy to be reactionaries.

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  6. @Tony

    What is it that is "reactionary" a about wanting to smash the abortion industry? Surely the reactionaries are those who want to keep the status quo?

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  7. Tony, you're lumping a lot of disparate things (and people) together. I cannot see biologically how abortion is not murder, but I am also against the death penalty, and middle of the road on Israel and Palestine. Your generalisations are just too large and inaccurate. You assert that all kinds of people are all the same as each other, but give no arguments for why anyone should believe such an unsupported assertion. Disappointedly, Dr Christopher Shell

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  8. Reactionaries are not always those that wish to keep the status quo. Biologically there is no such thing as murder anyway, it is a social invention.

    Human beings are conscious animals and consciousness begins when you are born and that is the beginning. The idea that terminating an unwanted pregnancy is a foul and repulsive idea.

    You may be opposed to the death penalty but the proponents of banning abortion in the USA aren't. Where is the main locus of opposition to abortion to be found? In the South, home of segregation, the KKK and today the main exponents of the death penalty.

    Those who argue that we should make abortion illegal are arguing that women should go back to the backstreets and suffer death and injury as a result. The idea that opponents of abortion are motivated by any humanitarian considerationsn is absurd. The leaders of the 'pro-Life' movement in the USA, which is where the ideas of Abort 67 originate are the outriders for waging war on America's perceived enemies.

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