Precious Life Hits Back at Petition Criticism
Precious Life were greatly disappointed in Justice Minister Claire Sugden MLA’s comments regarding the 300,000 pro-life petitions which were presented to the Dept of Justice on 28th November 2016. As you will read in our letters sent to the Justice Minister, it was made clear from the very beginning that the petitions were collected from various campaigns over a number of years; Precious Life never claimed otherwise.
29th November 2016
Ms Claire Sugden MLA
Justice Minister
Department of Justice
Block B
Castle Buildings
Stormont Estate
Belfast
BT4 3SG
Dear Ms Sugden MLA,
Yesterday, on behalf of the pro-life majority in Northern Ireland, a 300,000-strong petition was presented to the Northern Ireland Assembly calling for the protection of unborn children and their mothers from abortion. Forty-seven boxes full of individuals’ names and Northern Ireland postal addresses were then delivered to Massey House that afternoon.
Those boxes contain the following petitions:
v 250,000 petitions collected from various campaigns, including: Abortion: Not in My Name Campaign; The Basic Right Campaign; Protect the Human Campaign; petitions opposing numerous drafts of the Department of Health’s ‘abortion guidelines’; and petitions opposing the extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland.
v 35,000 petitions presented as part of the Project Justice campaign (September 2014).
These were in support of a proposed amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill to prohibit commercial provision of abortion in Northern Ireland.
v 30,000 ‘Stop Marie Stopes Campaign’ petition postcards.
Extra petitions:
v 20,000 petitions from Northern Ireland presented to the European Parliament in Brussels as part of the One of Us European Citizens’ Initiative calling on the European Commission to end EU funding of research which involved the destruction of human embryos (November 2013).
v 23,622 petitions presented as part of the Project Love campaign in opposition to the then Justice Minister David Ford MLA’s public consultation on changing the law to allow abortion in cases of “lethal foetal abnormality and sexual crime” (handed into Massey House in January 2015).
v 5,000 “Personhood begins at Conception” petitions so far (this is Precious Life’s latest campaign).
These extra petitions were not included in yesterday’s presentation. However, all of the petitions mentioned in this letter are real proof of the united and unyielding conviction of the pro-life majority in Northern Ireland that every human being, born or unborn, has an unconditional right to life and should remain protected by our laws.
I would like to request permission for Precious Life to collect the forty-seven boxes of petitions from Massey House on Monday 5th December. Would this be possible?
I look forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards,
Bernadette Smyth
Director
Precious Life
16th December 2016
Ms Claire Sugden MLA
Justice Minister
Department of Justice
Block B
Castle Buildings
Stormont Estate
Belfast
BT4 3SG
Dear Ms Sugden MLA,
I am writing to express my disappointment in your response to Ms Paula Bradshaw MLA’s request for an “assessment of the signatures” on Amnesty International and Precious Life’s petitions on Wednesday 14th December 2016.
Neither Jim Wells MLA nor I claimed that the 300,000 petitions were collected from one campaign or within a specific time frame, nor did we claim that the 300,000 petitions concerned the current push for abortion of unborn children with life-limiting disabilities. In fact, I specifically mentioned in my letter to you on 29th November 2016 that petitions from a number of other campaigns were not included in the presentation, such as the 23,622 petitions presented as part of the Project Love campaign in opposition to the then Justice Minister David Ford MLA’s public consultation on changing the law to allow abortion in cases of “lethal foetal abnormality and sexual crime”. As you know, over 99% of the responses to this consultation were opposed to any change in the law. The Project Love petitions were handed into Massey House in January 2015. When delivering the 300,000 petitions to Massey House on 28th November 2016, Amanda Patterson informed me that the Project Love petitions had been disposed of.
The 300,000 petitions presented were an impressive representation of the pro-life majority in Northern Ireland. Collected over a number of years, these petitions were real proof of the united and unyielding conviction of the pro-life majority in Northern Ireland that every human being, born or unborn, has an unconditional right to life and should remain protected by our laws. Contrary to what Amnesty International claim, the pro-life majority have not changed their views on abortion.
I expected you as the Justice Minister to be fair in your appraisal of the petitions. However, it seemed like you dismissed the petitions as unworthy of further consideration, simply because they were collected from various campaigns over a number of years. You also stated that the petitions contained addresses outside Northern Ireland. I am very interested to know exactly how many addresses were from outside Northern Ireland.
To your understanding, Amnesty International’s petition was “signed by people from across the UK”. Considering that a person ‘signing’ this petition only had to provide his or her name or email address, and your omission of the fact that Amnesty’s petition was not only calling for the legalisation of abortion in cases of rape, incest and “‘severe’ or fatal foetal impairment” but the decriminalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland in general, I wonder whether your officials subjected Amnesty’s ‘45,000-strong petition’ to the same level of scrutiny as they did to Precious Life’s petitions.
By your dismissive comments on 14th December 2016, I feel that you have, whether advertently or inadvertently, undermined the credibility of the 300,000 petitions presented by Precious Life on 28th November 2016 and, consequently, the voice of the pro-life majority in Northern Ireland.
I would like to respectfully request a meeting with you, at your own convenience, to further discuss the 300,000 petitions.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Bernadette Smyth
Director
Precious Life