‘ABORTION: NOT IN OUR NAME’ demonstration in opposition to Amnesty International’s ‘My Body My Rights’ Campaign launch at the MAC in Belfast City Centre.
21/10/2014: Northern Ireland's leading pro-life organisation Precious Life, organised an ‘ABORTION: NOT IN OUR NAME’ demonstration in opposition to Amnesty International’s ‘My Body My Rights’ Campaign launch at the MAC in Belfast City Centre. The demonstration was to highlight that the people of Northern Ireland are totally opposed to any change in Northern Ireland’s abortion law.
According to poll results of an Amnesty International ‘Attitudes to Abortion’ survey conducted in Northern Ireland in October 2014, ‘between 6 and 7 in 10 of the sample feel that abortion should be made available in certain circumstances.’ However, the survey was only conducted on 1000 adults.
In response to these poll results, Director of Precious Life, Bernadette Smyth, said, “Abortion is a serious criminal offence in Northern Ireland. The law here protects unborn babies, and David Ford must not change it. Amnesty’s poll results are inaccurate and misleading, and do not represent the people of Northern Ireland. The people of Northern Ireland have repeatedly told the Stormont Government, with a presentation of 120,000 petitions in 2008, 250,000 petitions 2013, and 35,000 petitions in 2014, that abortion will never be in our name.”
Referring to the Department of Justice’s current consultation on allowing abortion in the cases of ‘lethal foetal abnormality’, Bernadette Smyth continued:
“Our voices will be heard that every life matters; every unborn baby must be protected in law, policy and practice. What is needed for parents and their unborn children who have been diagnosed with a life-limiting condition is perinatal hospice care. When given loving support, freedom from abandonment and careful counsel as to clinical expectations, parents will give their baby a life filled with love, warmth and protection, however brief their baby’s life may be.
“To dismiss a woman’s precious unborn baby as ‘incompatible with life’ and decide that no medical intervention or treatment will be provided but promote the killing of her baby as the best available care, is a shameful reflection of a eugenic society.”
Abortion on grounds of disability sends a clear discriminatory message that those with the same disability should not have been born; that their lives are not worth living. Babies with disabilities are no less human than other children and share the same right to life as all other human beings.
Remarkably, on the same day as Amnesty’s campaign launch to legalise abortion in Northern Ireland, a new exhibition highlighting Hitler’s horrific execution of thousands of adults and children with disabilities under his nauseatingly cruel Euthanasia Programme opened in Belfast. This exhibition is a moving reminder of an often forgotten part of the Holocaust; of the Nazi propaganda against the disabled, regularly labeling them “life unworthy of life” or “useless eaters” and highlighting their burden upon society, culminating in their elimination.
This exhibition has arrived in the midst of a frightening and alarming push in Northern Ireland to discriminate against and kill vulnerable and defenceless unborn children. It is our responsibility to make our voices heard and fight against this eugenic culture.