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Nick V.
Gonna share this with my fellow Students for Life members tonight as we make our signs for the March this Friday, I think you've brought up some reasonable points.
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Dane
I agree with Cassi below, generally a really good nuanced article, with my one small issue being that I think the climate slogan might be counter-productive, as I think it will cause passers by to jump to the conclusion that the person holding it opposes action on climate change (support for more action corrolates with supporting abortion being legal), which I think would have the effect of feeding stereotypes about pro-lifers, and perhaps making a good conversation harder (though the others are great, and exactly the sort of thing I'd have suggested as a lefty).
I had hoped I might jump in with some highly hetrodox and/or controversial (even to non-conservatives) perspectives caused by being both pro-life and also extremely left wing (to the extent that I make Bernie look centrist on some issues), but my comment ended up being rather too long (about 25% longer than the blog post). Is there a mod that I could email at all, or that could respond who I could run it past? Was roughly going to cover my critcisms of the UK March for Life (some controversial, but meant constructively), what I did instead at the 2018 one with getting the pro-life position across to the passers by I could chat to and the successes I had with the conversations I had with them, and also some musings about tactics and (illustrative) victories used by the other movement I'm involved in (fossil fuel divestment), to try and argue that the pro-life movement should do widespread peaceful direct action again (see, I did say it would be controversial, but genuinely trying to argue in good faith).
Aware of the commenting rules about going off-topic, and suspect there is some slight digression that I'll need to trim slightly (though it's purely to sketch out my arguments or provide context to other readers), and rather too much in the way of brackets for clarification purposes (since I'm not trying to be uncharitable to anyone). Not aiming to try and directly argue for the other views here as I know full well that would be off topic to some degree (other than talking about links between fossil fuel and abortion lobbyists, or mentioning embryo testing done by the US military back in the 50's, but mainly for illustrative purposes), I hasten to add.
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TooManyJens
I agree about the climate change one. I think it could be improved by adding "Even" at the beginning.
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Dane
Yes, I think that would work.
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Rachel Crawford
Hi Dane, thank you for your thoughtful comment. I’m the editor of the blog these days and am also the primary mod. You’re welcome to email me at rachel@equalrightsinstitute.com. It would be helpful to me if you could include at the beginning of your email a note about what you’re asking permission for so I know how to help you. Thanks!
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Dane
Thanks for the speedy reply, have sent you an email with the title "UK March for Life musings". Also, realise I commented on here a few months back about some free speech issues we had with a disruptive protest at one of our events, but never got back to you about the reply- posthumous thanks, we more or less did what was suggested (though the protest was around 2 years ago).
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Dane
Following on from email correspondences, posting my takes in a long thread as replies to this comment. A heads up to everyong else that it's rather long, coming in at 5 parts. Parts 1 & 2 critique the UK march and to a lesser extent the UK pro-life movement rather robustly (said another way, I'd save this critique if I was pro-choice), and part 3 talks about what I did instead. In part 4 I explain what my strategies were for engaging with passers by and give some examples of arguments that I think are likely to be effective towards the left, and in part 5 I give case studies of peaceful direct action that have been effective in the other movement I'm involved in.
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Dane
Part 1/5: I do think that the two movements [climate justice and pro-life] are perhaps in different positions over here to some degree- the UK generally speaking does not like the pro-life movement at all or agree with our viewpoints beyond wanting a bit more regulation here and there, while the public is definitely
supportive of taking more action on climate change than is currently the case. I'd pin this down on the fact that it's easy for us to point at terrible American pro-lifers that keep using religion alone to justify their positions (am Christian myself, but have always been anti-euthanasia and mostly pro-life, even before converting, and it's absolutely not a religious issue for me at all) and in practice it means we don't think more critically about if we're correct ourselves. The UK isn't particularly left-wing, but religious conservatism goes down like a cup of cold tea here, and even we wouldn't touch that despite jokes to the contrary, while the UK is one of the most secular countries in Europe. There exist other things in the UK's culture that I would blame as well for the support for abortion, but that I shall not go into now, just for reasons of space; though I think the root cause to a large degree is a euthanasia mindset.
I suppose that my main issue (with the wider UK pro-life movement) is one of how we organise, and also that the pro-life movement here doesn't know how to
persuade non-Christians of its viewpoint (in my experience, almost every UK pro-lifer is practicing Christian, and at my uni 80-90% of the activists are
Catholics; so we have further outreach issues). There are secular pro-lifers in the UK but I’ve only heard of one at my uni, and I genuinely can’t think of any actively involved in the movement. On the latter point this strikes me as even more true at the UK March for Life (which is still way too religious, and they've toned it down from previous years, prayer was an explicit part of the 2016/7 marches), and also have to critique the signs all being more or less the same mass-produced ones by the organisers with a background image of a UK flag (not at all typical at a general UK protest, compare this with a school climate strike or one of the large anti-Brexit rallies in London for comparison). Indeed, I believe that I only saw one other sign out of around 2000-5000 people with an actual image of a fetus (a few have born babies, but I think that’s a bad strategy for reasons I could expand upon later) on their signs at the previous one in went to in 2018. (I had a small foot injury at the time so can't speak to 2019's march, but have been to 2016 and 2017 as well, 2015 was the first march but I didn’t know about it at the time.)
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Dane
Part 2/5: Much more concerning to my mind is the fact that while graphic fetal images are banned (I'm in favour of using them some, but not all of the time on grounds of justice and efficiency and think the March for Life is one of those times) and non-graphic images are almost non-existent at the main march, the organisers didn't see fit to ban a couple of people from waving a UK flag and behaving in a deliberately inflammatory way to the 50-80 or so counter-protesters, including an MP (why any pro-lifer here is patriotic is beyond me given that we have abortion up to birth for disability and 24 weeks on grounds that are close to on-demand in practice, though I'm admittedly anti-patriotism in general as a matter of principle; flag waving here isn't really a thing like in the US for cultural context), and given divisions over Brexit, can be moderately controversial in some contexts. Certainly, a multicultural metropolitan city like London is not one I’d see any advantages to, and perhaps risks alienating some of the population (EU and other international citizens in particular).
Also, one of the pro-choice commentators on Secular pro-life pointed out a few months ago that one of the 2019 speakers (Obianuju) defended a law in Uganda that directly criminalised homosexuality in a now missing article on lifesitenews. While I don't think this is why she was invited, as she has some genuinely good points about abortion and eugenics being modern colonialism pushed on Africa but misadvertised as charitable foreign aid and deserves to be heard, even though I disagree with her on quite a bit of other stuff (ironically, said laws on homosexuality came from British colonial administrators). I would hope that we can presumably agree on what it makes the march must look like to observers aware of this (whether rightly or wrongly), and would have to go quite a bit further than that and would say that the organisers do need to say explicitly that homophobia isn’t welcome in the pro-life movement.
I also say that the fact we didn't have anything remotely explicit resembling policy proposals, or soundbites (evidently unpersuasive ones at that) to help women with unplanned pregnancies just ends up feeding the myth that we don't care about women. I don't mean this as a direct attack on conservatives sceptical of government intervention (although I think it clearly works at reducing both poverty and abortions, compare the UK with Finland, they have more or less the same abortion law but Finland has a way bigger welfare state), although I genuinely do think that there are sadly some abortion opponents that at the very least should know better and at worst are being selfish. I do also feel it entirely fair to criticise Fiona Bruce MP, who is the head of the all-Parliamentary pro-life group (and deserves a lot of credit for speaking out on conventional pro-life stuff and also the Hong Kong situation+ human rights in mainland China), but voted along party lines to introduce a clause that refused child benefit after the second child unless the claimant can prove the child was born from rape (even more infuriatingly, private abortion provider BPAS has a better record here despite supporting abortion up to birth).
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Dane
Part 3/5: That all said, time I talk about the things I both did myself as constructive suggestions (some of which non-liberal pro-life readers will almost certainly disagree with), but hopefully there are ideas in here that any pro-lifer can use. To start, I thought that I'd bring along a sign (well, actually 4 of them, I liked to swap them round) with an actual fetal image and quotes on fetal development, they work as good conversation tools, I also used the fetal rights argument (which I agree tends to be one of the best pro-life arguments out there). If I recall, I used one of Lennart Nilsson’s photos of a 6 week embryo, a 7.5 week one of the EHD, and one that I think was a 12 week fetus with the words “not a potential life, a life with potential”. My fourth sign had a repeat of the 6 week fetus picture, but was a bit different to the other signs.
Here comes the twist, I also put on slogans, or rather political statements that were decidedly left wing in nature, specifically stuff like #Propeaceprolife, abolish trident (the UK nuclear weapons system), an anti-Trump slogan from memory (might be wrong about that though), and the like and made sure my rhetoric matched this (indeed, I argued that just as racial minorities, LBGT people etc have been discriminated against, so are the unborn).
My fourth sign was a bit different - I had a sign that said (from memory, as someone pro-life at the end of the march asked for it and I said yes) oppose
all dehumanisation, listed off a bunch of things on it such as sexism, racism, homo/trans/interphobia, (and even drew on an intersex rights and trans rights
flag), war (put a peace sign on mine), poverty, and also had abortion listed somewhere in the middle (with a small image of the 6 week embryo).
I think (as you can never be totally sure) that I was able to get a passerby on the political centre-left (he leaned towards supporting the UK Labour Party
from what I could tell) to more or less agree that abortion is killing a baby (I did also say to him that I wasn’t terribly keen on the march being so overtly religious), and had a really good chat with two people while the talks were happening that I think were activists on the other side (was at the edge of the green on Parliament Square). We actually had a really good civil chat, and one of them said "you know, it does kind of make sense", to the equality argument I mentioned above, so I assume must have done something right there, and perhaps the fact that I said we should quadruple child benefits helped, it certainly wasn’t a hostile conversation by any means (they said they were with me on all the other causes I mentioned). I do think that a fair number of the counter-protesters at the march can be unreasonable, or at the least deliberately disruptive (large group dynamics definitely do make this worse), for context, though there weren’t any issues like this that I was aware of at the 2018 march (a nice change to be sure).
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Dane
Part 4/5: So why do I raise this, particularly given that I imagine that many if not most readers here are going to disagree with me on a lot of political questions? (Incidentally, I do think it inconsistent to be pro-life but not oppose the death penalty, or almost any war in practice, but that's not what I wish to get into here.) I wanted to illustrate anecdotally that it's a lot easier to change somebody's mind my appealing to their values. There is infact some scientific evidence that our brains interpret an attack on our strongly held views in the same way we view it as an attack on ourselves, and that trying to directly attack them (the viewpoints) like this isn't necessarily effective (in fact, it may if anything have the effect of strengthening the viewpoint); I can provide studies to back this claim up if asked. On the other hand, if I make pro-life arguments from left-wing values, I can get a lot further with getting to the heart of the matter (i.e the humanity of the preborn), and to some extent get over some initial resistance towards discussing pro-life ideas. Obviously, I realise that this tactic is intrinsically harder for conservatives to use, and the flip-side is that I find it a lot harder to use arguments from shared values with conservatives, though I think there’s no reason why what I raise briefly below couldn’t be of use to you.
An example of some things I would raise are the connections between the fossil fuel industry, military, neoliberal economics and abortion funders. For example BP, Exxon-Mobil and Shell have both made some donations to Planned Parenthood, and the pro-abortion/eugenics Rockefeller foundation is named after the oil tycoon that set it up; I would also note a decent amount of overlap between the businesses that donate to the Atlantic Council (a conservative think tank that's pro-military intervention, neoliberal economics and fossil fuel expansion), and Planned Parenthood, who seem happy to take donations from big banks and weapons producers (not just the ones that they use to kill fetuses either, I had in mind fighter jets and the like). They’ve also lobbied against universal healthcare and busted unions while paying some staff less than $13/hour and having a record of pregnancy discrimination (all useful things to point out to the pro-choice lefties).
Although I didn't know this at the time, there is actually a connection between UK nuclear weapons and preborn humans being killed, the US military did some lethal human experiments on embryos in the early 50's to understand the effects of radiation, which is right around the time the UK got it's nukes, and the US shared the results of their research technology with the UK, indeed our nukes are partly owned by the US (there also exists a history of First Nations people both in the US and Canada being targeted for forced sterilisations/abortions, which Vice News reports is still ongoing). I think this sort of thing would have been worth raising, as would warmonger Kissinger’s support for abortion being used as population control (see US National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests). Oh, and I forgot to mention that the patents to the abortion pill in the US are owned by a shell company in a tax haven, with links to the pro-eugenics population council funded by the rich, and has been tested on racial minorities, while being produced in China and used in an ongoing genocide against Uyghur Muslims.
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Dane
Part 5/5: Finally, I raised the claim that the tactics of the activist left are better at getting results than the mainstream pro-life movement has been (Roe is still
the law of the land 47 years later, and in the UK it's been going even worse overall), while on the other hand it would be hard to deny the successes of say the feminist, LGBTIQA+ or civil rights movements (even though I and other left-wing activists would argue that there are still an awful lot of issues to fix on these fronts). Let me give some examples from my own climate justice movement.
Manchester University has some large fossil fuel investments, so some students from the local branch of the group People and Planet decided to occupy the management building in protest for several days, despite being given some fairly harsh treatment (by UK uni standards at least), and since the uni staff wouldn't let food through, it was going the direction of turning into a hunger strike, some of the students were also unable to use the toilets as well. Several days later, the uni made an offer that went a lot further than fossil fuel divestment did (assuming they don't backtrack), a student occupation at St John’s College Oxford over fossil fuel investments also got some decent concessions (students rather than fossil fuel companies now advise the investment board and there will be a divestment motion brought forward in the next few months).
A campaign of peaceful direct action by protesters also got the UK Conservative government (in favour of fracking) to U-turn and stop handing out new fracking licences last year (cynically, done as a pre-election ploy); there have also been successes with recruitment events at universities by fossil fuel (and arms) companies being cancelled (by them) due to the threat of protests. (I normally tend to be opposed to shutting things down on free speech grounds, but I think it's morally justified in this case; corporations aren't persons and the business model is one that I think exploits the global poor, and they've also killed activists in the developing world before.)
Most substantially of all, the Extinction Rebellion protests in London that involved some road blocking with the intention of being deliberately arrested for peaceful civil disobedience has had the effects of pushing climate change way up the political agenda (you can see this in YouGov polling), leading to a wave of new activists and in theory a world-leading target from the previous UK government (still well off what the protesters want, and being ignored mind you), similar actions led to airport expansion at Bristol being stopped.
Perhaps the main difference in how climate movements organise is that they tend to be fairly non-hierarchical and our work gets very devolved, this hasn't been what I've observed in my student pro-life group. I suspect somebody will raise that they think widespread peaceful direct action will turn people away from the pro-life movement; to that I can only say that we have polling from the late 60's showing people saying the same thing about civil rights activists, and that clearly worked. You can perhaps conclude that I think our movement needs to also work on disrupting abortion enablers (though not to the point of going to the houses of abortionists) with peaceful civil disobedience again (going after banks that hold accounts for them seems like it might be an interesting tactic to try, among others). Also, I am fully aware of violence in the 90's; I have to blame that on some activists being vocally in favour of the death penalty for abortionists and pro civil disobedience as well, along with it being a response in part to police brutality (though it's still an unacceptable act of terrorism, and somewhat controversially so is going to war).
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cassicox
Andrew, this is a fantastic article. Timely, appropriate and well-articulated. As a pro-life advocate and someone in the front lines of this issue, I really appreciate the ERI's nuance. Thank you for this.
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Christine
Honestly, I think this article is a bit too snarky for my taste, and it poses some of the same issues as the posters that Andrew critiques. Please don't demonize a (frankly, very large) segment of the pro-life movement just because you don't agree with some of their politics. You're far less likely to change their opinions about dialogue if you treat them as "deplorables."
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joshbrahm
Hey Christine, just wanted you to know that this comment got flagged for some reason but it wasn't us. I just approved it, because as our comments policy states, we have no problem with commenters disagreeing with us. Sorry for the delay.
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Anonymous
This one wouldn’t look bad on a pro-life sign IMO :)
https://www.deviantart.com/jc-790514/art/Mewtwo-Pokemon-Quote-Poster-449317397