Apologies for the very long copy-and-paste but here's an article from today's Times by Janice Turner, who I almost always agree with wholeheartedly. And today's no exception. It's very frightening how a bunch of pro-life loons have hijacked. I've pasted it because otherwise it's behind a paywall.
ARTICLE: In February the group Abort67 set up a Facebook live-stream opposite the BPAS abortion clinic in Hastings. Any woman going inside that day, past the protesters waving placards showing magnified photos of bloody foetuses, risked being exposed on social media.
At another BPAS (British Pregnancy Advisory Service) clinic, a woman was called by her violent partner who opposed the abortion. He had given both their mobile numbers to the Good Counsel Network, which regularly protested outside. When the protesters saw her going in alone, they let him know and later texted her, demanding she cancel the abortion.
Until about 2010, such tactics were unknown in Britain. Public opinion is overwhelmingly settled on our long-standing abortion laws. Then the group 40 Days for Life began organising Lent vigils that it claimed were peaceful and “prayerful”. Yet they weren’t lobbying law-makers in parliament, but catcalling and leafleting women. Some patients reported being followed and their car registration numbers being taken. Protesters carried cameras on the pretext of recording violent counter-demos, making women fearful of being identified. They were so disruptive that a BPAS clinic in Blackfriars, central London, was almost evicted from a building it shares with a GP surgery after understandable concerns raised by doctors and patients.
These methods and objectives — to close legal clinics and scare women away from using them — have one significant source: the powerful, wealthy American anti-abortion lobby. Abort67 is a project of the US Center for Bio-Ethical Reform; the Good Counsel Network is affiliated to the US movement 40 Days for Life. British groups receive training and funds from their mighty American counterparts, which are now endorsed by passionate anti-choice supporters in the White House.
After Donald Trump tweeted his vow to secure US medical assistance for Charlie Gard, the brain-damaged 11-month-old with a rare mitochondrial disease at the centre of a controversial court case, the pro-life lobby seized the case. The Rev Patrick Mahoney, who was jailed for violating a court order not to picket Texan abortion clinics, and Catherine Glenn Foster, the president of Americans United for Life, flew to Britain to begin acting as spokespeople for Charlie’s parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard.
Charlie Gard cannot breathe unaidedCharlie Gard cannot breathe unaided
PA
Mahoney, who was photographed praying at Charlie’s bedside in Great Ormond Street Hospital, claims his visit has Trump’s blessing and he updates the president on Charlie’s progress. Glenn Foster, meanwhile, is a lawyer who has litigated against many US abortion providers and seeks to overturn Roe v Wade, the US ruling on legal abortion.
So why has this tragic British baby become a magnet for the US anti-abortion lobby? First, for the Trump administration Charlie is a useful domestic teaching aid to oppose Obamacare: behold how “socialised medicine” is so cold and heartless it not only murders the unborn but lets disabled babies die. See, Sarah Palin was right about UK “death panels”.
If tomorrow Charlie’s parents secure High Court permission to take him to America for experimental treatment that has, at most, a 10 per cent chance of improving his health, it will be a victory for free-market medicine, which never gives up. Providing, of course, you have the cash. Charlie’s parents have raised £1.3 million for his general care in America, which, unlike in the UK, would not be state-funded. Low-income US parents of such a child, even with health insurance, would reach a financial cap or be bankrupted by co-payments. American Charlie Gards die every day, yet Mahoney isn’t praying for them.
Chris Gard and Connie YatesChris Gard and Connie Yates
ANDY RAIN/EPA
Second, the Gard case helps to dispel a key criticism of anti-abortion campaigners, that they care only for the unborn, never the born. Religious conservatives are the harshest critics of state assistance for single mothers even though, in their moral terms, they have done the “right” thing and kept their babies. Yet with Charlie Gard’s case they can surf a wave of universal sympathy and show themselves for once genuinely “pro-life”: fearless, energetic advocates of a real, suffering child.
But why this baby? As the Gard case snowballs into a movement, what it most evokes is the anti-vaccination campaign, driven by a belief among some parents that their children’s autism was caused by doctors inoculating them with MMR. Such claims, by the British doctor Andrew Wakefield, have been universally discredited, yet even now some parents refuse to immunise their babies, while angry online groups brew conspiracy theories. The left blames big pharma; the right blames big state.
The “anti-vax” movement, with its distrust of experts, science and official knowledge, is argued to be the seed-corn of our febrile politics from Brexit to Trump. Politicians, judges, doctors, economists . . . what do they care for ordinary people like us? All this legal opinion and medical expertise is just there to confuse and control us. We must look out for our own. Who knows better what a child needs: so-called experts or his loving parents?
On Channel 4 News, Foster was asked how she knew that the vast tranche of medical evidence compiled by Great Ormond Street Hospital was wrong. She disputes the hospital’s view that Charlie’s condition cannot be improved, that he is suffering pain (he is on low doses of morphine) and that prolonging his life is cruel. And she replied that, although “I am not a doctor”, she had studied his ECGs and MRI scans and knew better than the most famous children’s hospital in the world. Charlie, Foster said, would “bring hope to the world”.
We live in an age where feelings matter more than facts, faith more than truth. If Connie Yates believes her son is “getting stronger”, that this US treatment could make Charlie — who cannot swallow, open his eyes or breathe unaided — “a normal boy”, who are experts to contradict her? It is entirely understandable when poor Chris Gard, grieving for his son and empowered by tweets from the Pope, yells, “When are you going to start telling the truth?” at a High Court judge. But does the magnitude of the couple’s suffering make them right?
Do parents indeed always know what is best for their children? The whole family court system is predicated on a belief that sometimes they do not. Jehovah’s Witnesses cannot deny their children life-saving blood transfusions; it is illegal for parents to subject their daughters to FGM. Both are essentially religious practices that society judges to be morally wrong. Should we allow parents to put a dying child through a pointless ordeal of overseas treatment just because they too have “hope” and “faith”?
Pro-life groups have picketed abortion clinicsPro-life groups have picketed abortion clinics
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
Ultimately the US religious right, as embodied by the grandstanding Mahoney, wants as much as any sharia court for religious belief to override secular law. The pastor even claimed that his prayers were answered when Great Ormond Street Hospital announced another court hearing. Galvanising kind-hearted people around #prayforcharlie hashtags is worth more in movement-building publicity for Mahoney’s anti-abortion lobby than any clinic protest. They wish the narrative of this profoundly sad case to be a battle of the individual against the state, the law and even knowledge itself.
It is tempting to think: why not let this poor couple take their baby to America; what harm can it do? And as a parent I feel it deeply: faced with a dying child, perhaps I too would lose all reason. But either we hold fast to first principles of carefully documented evidence, medical expertise and logic, or we capitulate to amorphous belief. We should applaud Mr Justice Francis for refusing to be swayed by tweets from the world’s most powerful men or by parental emotion, however heartfelt. The US right, which has elbowed its way to poor Charlie Gard’s bedside, has a troubling political agenda. It is the Pope’s job to believe in miracles, not the courts’.