Ealing Council have voted in favour of creating an exclusion zone around the infamous Marie Stopes abortion clinic in its area. Neither pro-lifers nor pro-abortionists can stand within 100 metres of the entrance to the building. It is a perfect solution for the council managing local unhappiness among its electorate and presumably for Marie Stopes UK which can now procede without the risk pro-lifers posed to their objectives. Don't get me wrong: they are a not-for-profit business. They have only the purest of motives: facilitating women's lives by extinguishing those of the unborn.
This is not incoherent: merely profoundly wrong. Once the law has allowed abortion, it makes perfect sense that those who avail themselves of this freedom should do so unimpeded. Allowing pro-lifers to stand outside these mills of death is like allowing atheists to stand at church doors distributing humanist leaflets. Many worshippers would affirm their right to freedom of worship and to be free of harassment when exercising it. Is poor Marie Stopes not doing the same thing?
They are all lost in a thicket of murderous logic. The Council can hide behind the law of the land and the idea is that anyone acting within the law should be able to do so without interference. What a brave stand for the councillors! Meanwhile, the academics who have facilitated the buffer zone concept can acclaim their 'impact' and be rewarded with promotions and peer esteem. Their research has had an extra-mural effect, and is this not why we fund universities - to be heard outside the ivory towers of academia?
And what about the unborn....? Ah, them. Well, the law implicitly says they only matter if we think they matter. If we think they don't matter, then they don't matter. It is that simple. The electorate want it this way, as one can hear in common language. When the unborn are wanted, they are 'babies '; when they are unwanted, they are 'foetuses'. One of the sociologists who has helped drive the buffer zone initiative wrote a rather whiny essay saying how use of the word 'child' for the unborn had to be got rid of. She has not finished yet and indeed has just won public funding to pursue her campaign for deconstruction of the pro-life movement.
And there is the hard lesson for people such as you and me. We are old fashioned enough to think it is about the issues, the substance of the moral arguments. Those who have facilitated the buffer zones know that once the law is on their side, they must no longer be advocates of direct action but now of the most merciless dialogical warfare. They don't look at arguments (I mean, why bother?); they look at what they call "discourses". They root out what they identify as the oppressive nature of the discourse - the power-driven construction of some set of vocabulary or speech acts - and then they tootle for all they are worth in their academic journals about how "pro-life" discourse is actually "anti-choice" and how irrational and anti-woman such discourses are. The fact that the Church backs the pro-life position works a treat for them, because there are few institutions with more credentials for oppression. Not that they have made that argument openly but need they do so? It speaks for itself. Only the State is the guarantor of freedom after all...
A few things are certain after this ruling by Ealing Council. First, women walking into Marie Stopes in Ealing will not have to brave the last call of conscience before they deliver the life of their unborn into the hands of the executioners. Second, fewer of them will decide not to abort and more of the unborn will die. Third, other councils will sit up and take notice, not because pro-lifers are a menace but because they will be persuaded that this is a pro-women action and because, after all, there is no electoral cost in smoothing the way for women intending to have an abortion. Dead men have no votes.
It's at times like this I wish I were both brave and clever. I don't mean clever enough to take a few pot shots at these people from a blog. Any idiot can do that. I mean clever enough, qualified enough, to do the counter studies on the women who have asked the Good Council Network for help and whose children owe their lives to the GCN. The decision of Ealing Council is like an edict against the value of the lives of the children of these mothers. It is like saying that all the hurt of the women approaching that clinic outweighs the dignity and value of the human lives that have been snatched from the clinic's jaws. It is long since time for them to speak and I pray they do so. It is also about time that someone senior in the Catholic Church created the platform for them.
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