12.05.2004

Wilful misunderstanding

Around the web: anti-abortion websites

It seems the good ship Respect cannot but keep running aground. The latest faux pas to hit the project is comrade Galloway's foolish comments concerning abortion. Apparently, as a believer in god, "I believe life begins at conception and therefore unborn babies have rights" (Independent on Sunday April 4). This is bad enough, but shockingly for a 'progressive' organisation there has not been a peep of criticism from the Respect executive. So not for the first time, the silence of the Socialist Workers Party has led them to become attorneys for the most backward elements in the coalition, and I doubt it will be the last time either.

Political cowardice, however, might not be the only reason for the SWP's silence on this issue. Tucked away on the Muslim Association of Britain website, we find Respect's 'external faction' heaping praise on Galloway's comments, and a call to back him and the coalition as a "real alternative" (www.mabonline.net). No mention of Respect's anti-war, anti-racist credentials - here is an explicit call to vote Respect on a reactionary basis. Now the SWP has never been noted for choosing socialist principles over meagre short-term advantage, but surely even they would balk at allowing this to be used for political capital?

In addition to MAB, Galloway has the charming Society for the Protection of Unborn Children as bedfellows on this issue (www.spuc.org.uk). The main feature on this small and imperfectly formed website is the latest edition of the Evangelicals news and prayer letter, which is useful for providing a snapshot of fundamentalist anti-choice thinking. The first item introduces George and Jan Bell, two upstanding citizens who have now joined the SPUC national council, and ask that our prayers go with them. Moving swiftly on, we have concerns voiced around euthanasia, pro-choice moves at the United Nations, and bizarrely the opportunity to obtain an anti-EU constitution paper (!)

What is not said is quite significant. Where we have moralising around unborn "innocent human beings", there is nothing on the millions of lives destroyed by 'our' inhuman system every day. The rest of the site is a hodgepodge of basic reproductive biology, based on the quasi-theological notion that human individuality is present from conception. Strangely they do not make much of this in their piece on the 'morning after pill'. Preferring to dwell on the medical consequences of imbibing this pill, it has to rely on a 40-year-old US health department leaflet to make the spurious claim that this constitutes abortion, rather than emergency contraception.

The other feature that caught my eye is SPUC's attempt to rope in young people by offering "cash prizes" in an essay-writing competition on the "sanctity of life". Perhaps younger comrades with time on their hands might want to take this up in relation to the Iraq war.

The gently-worded SPUC website seems quite fluffy compared to the National Right to Life Convention, one of the main anti-choice lobbyists in the USA (www.nrlc.org). I knew straightaway what kind of site I was looking at. Ridiculous buzzwords such as "foetal homicide" are used, and that poster boy of the anti-abortionists, George W Bush, is pictured happily signing the NRLC-backed 'unborn victims of violence' legislation into law. The irony of him being responsible for the deaths of thousands of once very-alive Iraqis and Afghans seems to be lost on the smiling faces surrounding Bush.

The drop-down menus at the head of the site provide the navigation. The first, 'Issue info', lists abortion, euthanasia, medicare, cloning and 'fact' sheets. The 'Abortion' option takes the viewer to a page of selective information, but interestingly opposition is couched in medical language. All the way through, they stress "the physiological and psychological consequences" of having a termination, and use such positions to 'rebut' pro-choice arguments.

For example, their response to a 'woman's right to choose' is that no woman has the right to kill her "baby" (as with SPUC, for the NRLC life begins at conception), and we are told that it is advances in antibiotics, not legalisation, that deserves credit for safeguarding women's lives. Needless to say, socialists should have no problems defeating these arguments - based as they are on wilful misunderstanding.

Back at the home page, viewers are treated to a typical shock-tactic: the diagrammatic rendering of a partial birth abortion. However, that is not half as shocking as the thousands of women maimed and killed by back-street abortionists, with or without antibiotics.