by Martin Smith
Lives matter, so
we are told.
A projected death
toll of one quarter of a million people persuaded the Prime Minister to shut
down the country at a cost of generating a Government debt greater in size than
the entire economy. [1] It appears that Boris Johnson was not alone in adhering
to the notion of ‘lives mattering, whatever the cost’. Leaders from around the
world were similarly emphatic as each darted to turn off their country’s
economic stop cock before slumping into a heap next to the proverbial cupboard
under the sink, wondering “Now what do we do?” They may since have
comforted themselves with the estimation that the European lockdown alone has
saved 3.1 million lives. [2]
Meanwhile, with
humanity hunkering down, a Black life ends cruelly and unjustly, bringing to
the fore once again the ugly historical fact of man’s unshakeable propensity
for inhumanity towards fellow man. Tragically extant, the irrational and
hateful dehumanising of one group of people by another, on the pathetically
arbitrary grounds of mere skin cell colour,
reminded the world that there are worse things in life than living with the
risk of harm inflicted by coronaviruses. But whilst a mishmash of
pseudo-coordinated healthcare responses from around the world may eventually
eradicate the latter problem, the organisation known as Black Lives Matter
(BLM) will never succeed in eradicating the former. Whilst acknowledging the
difficulty of speaking accurately about amorphous, fast growing and inevitably
fissiparous social movements (and leaving aside the naivety of so many people
seemingly thinking that an organisation run by neo-Marxists [3] will have a
beneficial effect on society), in terms of its eponymous and presumably core
aim BLM undermines the very value it seeks to uphold: it cannot claim any
credibility by decrying injustices rooted in the dehumanisation of a people
based on cell colour whilst at the same time, ignoring the
dehumanisation of those same people - and indeed others besides - on the
grounds of cell number.
I am writing, of
course, of BLM’s failure to speak out against the inestimable damage done to
Black women and their babies by abortion and the close relationship of its
leadership with Planned Parenthood (PP). The single largest abortion provider
in the US, [4] Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, the life of
whom ought to be of interest to BLM given that she was a racist eugenicist [5]
who sought the “gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of
defective stocks - those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest
flowers of American civilization”. [6] Her targets included the poorer
Black populations of the South. [7] Planned Parenthood’s defenders may say that
it has come some distance from its eugenic and racist origins but such a
defence sits uneasily alongside the fact that 79% of its abortion facilities
are located in African American and/or Hispanic areas [8] and that it is in
these ‘clinics’ that an average of 247 Black lives are lost each day. [9]
Figures presented by the Radiance Foundation show that this equates to more Black
lives lost in a fortnight at the hands of Planned Parenthood than were lost in
a century at the hands of racist lynch mobs, [10] and that abortion is in fact the
biggest killer of Black lives each year in the US, greatly exceeding deaths by
all other causes combined. [11] With abortion specifically marketed to Black
women in poorer neighbourhoods as if it were a trivial, cheery healthcare
choice, [12] is it surprising that in 2013 abortions of Black babies made up 36%
[13a] of all abortions in America, compared to a population proportion of Black
females aged 15-44 of just 16% [13b] and that in parts of New York City,
abortions of Black babies far exceed live births of the same? [14]
In spite of all of
this, we hear not a word from BLM. Indeed, one of its three co-founders has recently
teamed up with two former Planned Parenthood executives to form a new pressure
group [15] and, in a triumph of irony, the only tangible influence that BLM has
succeeded in having on PP is to have emboldened the staff of their New York
branch to speak out about racism within their workplace, specifically in terms
of racial pay inequality and the lack of upward mobility of Black employees. [16a]
In articulating their grievances, the employees concede that PP has “a
history [sic] and a present steeped in white supremacy” [16b] but
perplexingly they still fail to see the elephant in the room: that both historically
and presently racism appears to be inextricably linked to PP’s raison d’etre,
rather than being limited to blighting its workplace relations.
Linking back to my
opening paragraph, I would also argue that violating the principle of
non-contradiction is not limited to BLM. The great national effort to ‘Stay
at home, protect the NHS, save lives’ disguised a similar double standard,
albeit with the ‘lives that mattered’ being threatened by a virus rather than
the evil ideology of racial supremacy. When on March 23rd Boris
Johnson addressed the nation with a passionate plea for everyone to stay at
home in order to “save many, many lives” [17] he was followed up just
one week later by the Government redefining a woman’s home as a place where
abortion pills could be legally administered. To the delight of the UK’s
abortion industry, [18a] chemical abortions for up to 10 weeks gestation could
now be facilitated by BPAS’s “Pill by Post” and Marie Stopes’s “telemedicine”
[19] (Stopes, incidentally, was also a racist eugenicist… [20]). We do not yet know how many people will be affected
by this significant liberalisation of the abortion ‘law’ [21] although as of 22nd
May it was reported that BPAS alone had posted out 8000 pills [22] (a chemical
abortion involves taking two pills – mifepristone and misoprostol). [23] What
we do know is that the abortion lobby is tremendously influential. As recently
as March 25th, the Government strongly rejected efforts to hijack
the emergency Coronavirus Bill with abortion liberalisation measures [24] but
evidently powerful levers were pulled in the ensuing five days leading up to
the March 30th U-turn. So much for saving “many, many lives”
and for the harm to some women that this supposedly temporary measure will
cause. [25] According to Dr Edouard Sakiz, chairman of the French
pharmaceutical company that developed mifepristone in the 1980s, the effect of taken
the pill is one of “an appalling psychological ordeal” with the abortion
lasting up to a week. [26] Indeed, anyone who has seen the film Unplanned [27]
or who has read the abortion industry’s own estimation of the risks and
complications associated with undertaking a chemical abortion [28] will know
that serious physical and psychological harm can be experienced by the women
concerned, quite apart from the intended effect on the unborn baby. One factor
pertinent to the potential health impact on the women is of course the
gestation of the baby being aborted and how to dispose of its remains; the
Government’s rules allow for the pills to be taken up to 10 weeks into the
pregnancy, by which stage a baby’s body is essentially complete with actions
such as thumb sucking being readily observable by 4D pre-natal scanning. [29]
BPAS’s advice on the matter of disposal is cold: “You can decide
how you wish to dispose of the pregnancy remains [sic]. They can be
flushed down the lavatory or wrapped in tissue, placed in a small plastic bag
and put in the dustbin” [30] and fails to
acknowledge the psychological impact on women themselves, such as is illustrated
by the following quote: “[I] did not
know what to do with the lump, [I] would have wanted information before
about ... what to do with the embryo. The pain, you can take, the hard part was
to see the embryo.” [31]
At least nine
cases are reportedly being investigated where the pills were taken by women at gestations
greater than 10 weeks, including one case subject to police investigation where
a baby of 7 months was aborted at home under the scheme. [22]
The UK
Government’s double standard of protecting lives from coronavirus whilst
simultaneously liberalising the law allowing for the destruction of lives in
the womb, achieved a sort of macabre ‘completing of the circle’ when, on May 18th,
it announced £65.5 million of funding to support Oxford
University-AstraZeneca’s development of a coronavirus vaccine. [32] What the
press release failed to mention is that the vaccine is being developed using a cell
line derived from the kidneys of a baby girl who was aborted in the Netherlands
in 1972. [33] This is not the only research effort making use of tissue derived
from aborted babies, but fortunately there are many other ethical approaches to
producing a vaccine that are also well underway. [33]
To paraphrase
Michael Faraday, the anaesthetic effect of a social norm is powerful indeed. [34]
It took eleven defeated votes in Parliament before Royal Assent was finally
given to a Bill outlawing the British slave trade in 1807. [35] Why so long?
Doubtless there were entrenched financial interests that resisted change,
doubtless also there were entrenched bigots who stood proudly for the
dehumanisation of Black people. But I imagine that the ‘anaesthetic effect’ of
slavery being a normal part of society’s structure and functioning also played
a part in demagnetising the needle of many people’s moral compass. I suggest
that we are in the same place today vis à
vis abortion, with the ‘mattering of a life’ no longer being contingent on
its objective ontological status. Lives do indeed
matter, but any claim to this end by popular movements, governments or
individuals is vacuous unless it includes all lives, born and unborn,
regardless of race.
Thank you for
reading this article. If you are struggling after an abortion experience, Abortion
Recovery Care and Helpline (ARCH) may be able to help you. See https://www.archtrust.org.uk/ or call 0345 603
8501.
References
All weblinks checked
w/b 29th June 2020.
[3] The neo-Marxist ideology of BLM is
illustrated not only by aspects of its policies and the actions of groups and
individuals acting under the BLM banner, but also by the admission of one its
co-founders, Patrisse Cullors, 7 minutes into this interview: https://therealnews.com/stories/pcullors0722blacklives
[5] p19-21 The Global Sexual
Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom, Kuby, G.,
Angelico Press/Life Site 2015. Also, see https://www.pop.org/the-repackaging-of-margaret-sanger/
[6]
See the 8th paragraph of Article 1 of Highlights in the
History of Birth Control, Sanger M., at https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=306641.xml
[8] See p3 of https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU10/20171101/106562/HHRG-115-JU10-Wstate-ParkerS-20171101-SD001.pdf
[9] For details on how the figure of 247
was calculated using data from 2014 and 2016, see http://www.theradiancefoundation.org/theleadingkiller/
[11] For a 1 minute video outlining figures
showing that abortion kills more Black lives than all other causes of death
combined see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5-2cGDDzYw&feature=emb_title
[13a] See the first paragraph in the Race
and Ethnicity section of https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/ss/ss6512a1.htm, note that only
29 States fed data into this report. [13b] https://www.marchofdimes.org/peristats/ViewSubtopic.aspx?reg=99&top=14&stop=126&lev=1&obj=3&cmp=&slev=1&sty=&eny=&chy=2013
[16a] https://saveppgny.wordpress.com/ [16b] See the final
sentence of the fourth paragraph of ref 16a.
[17] See 5 min 40 sec into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlJIwTd9fqI
[18a] BPAS, the British
Pregnancy Advisory Service, has tweeted https://twitter.com/bpas1968/
status/1251122018793205760: “The move to telemedical services is one which
is in the best interest of women and something we have been pushing for, this
should not be temporary.” Quoted in reference
18b: https://www.spuc.org.uk/Portals/0/ThemePluginPro/uploads/2020/6/1/SPUC%20%E2%80%93%20Remote%20Abortion%20Briefing%20PDF.pdf
[19] The British
Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) is one of
the UK’s largest abortion providers. For “Pill by Post” and “telemedicine” see
p2 of ref. 18b.
[21] Abortion is in fact illegal per
se and it remains unlawful to carry out an abortion in a person’s home,
hence the use of inverted commas around the term ‘law’. For more information on
the ‘legality’ of abortion see reference 25.
[23] See p2 of ref. 18b.
[24] From p9 of ref. 18b:
The timeline of events was:
• Monday 23 March 2020: A letter appears
on the Department of Health’s website which classed the home of a doctor as a
place where abortion could be prescribed and the home of the woman as the place
where the abortion could take place. Later that evening the document was
removed from the website, with the website stating that the announcement was
“published in error, there will be no changes to abortion regulations.” Over
the next few days, Government spokespeople, including the Health Minister,
stated repeatedly that no changes were planned to abortion regulations.
• Wednesday 25 March: Amendments to allow
home abortions, and to dispense with the requirement that two doctors certify a
woman for an abortion, are tabled to the emergency Coronavirus Bill. The
Government spokesperson speaks out strongly against these amendments, and they
are withdrawn.
• Monday 30 March: The Health Minister
approves a woman’s home as a place where abortion pills can be taken, and a
doctor’s home as a place they can be prescribed.
• Tuesday 31 March: Similar approvals are
made by the Health Minister in Wales and the Chief Medical Officer in Scotland
• Monday 6 April: Marie Stopes UK launches
a “telemedicine” abortion service, followed a few days later by BPAS’ (British
Pregnancy Advisory Service) “pills by post”.
[25] See http://portsmouthpoint.blogspot.com/2017/07/8700000.html for information on
abortion law and also on the health effects on men and women of abortion.
[26] p48, Abortion Matters,
McCarthy, A., Philos Educational Publications, 2018.
[28] See p4 of ref. 18b.
[30] See p6 of ref. 18b, first
paragraph.
[31] See p6 of ref. 18b, in the red
box.
[34] Michael Faraday once spoke of
the “anaesthetic of familiarity”.
[35] https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/tradeindustry/slavetrade/overview/parliament-abolishes-the-slave-trade/ and https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/tradeindustry/slavetrade/key-dates/
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