But rescues don’t work
Our experience so far has been that most, if not all, of the people who have attempted to push past or step over us have been able to do so and so have gained entry to the abortion death-houses. Most of these places have two or three entrances and with the low numbers of people participating in the rescues it has meant that there have been just one to four people sitting in front of the doors.
Does this mean then that the actions have been failures?
We do not believe that that needs to be the conclusion drawn. We would like to stop everyone from entering these places and we hope that one day we will have enough people involved to enable us to succeed in doing that. It is also possible that because of our presence some people may have gone away without attempting to enter the abortion clinic and some of those who did enter may have been challenged by action to think again and may not have gone ahead with their abortion. We simply do not know what positive outcomes there may have been.
But whether we actually keep people out or not, we still consider that intervening is worth doing – simply because we believe that endeavouring to stop innocent human lives being taken is always right, even if we do not always succeed in achieving our objective.
We see these abortion clinics as nothing other than specialised centres for carrying out executions. They operate openly in our suburbs with everyone’s full knowledge of where they are and what goes on inside them. We do not believe it is right that they should be allowed to operate unhindered. We ask ourselves, if these places were killing born children, would we have problems recognising that we ought to try and prevent these places from functioning? I don’t think we would. The question then becomes, if we regard born and preborn children as having the same moral value, why should we think it acceptable to try and stop ‘clinics’ operating if they should kill born children, but allow them to function if they kill preborn children?
We realise that our actions will not in themselves stop all women who want to have abortions from getting them. Even if we manage to close the abortion clinics some/many women will still manage to get abortions elsewhere. It is not possible to ensure that no abortions will happen in secret. But that fact does not mean that we should therefore accept the presence of these execution centres operating freely in our suburbs. We know just where some children are planned to be killed by abortion – at these places. So we believe that we have a responsibility to try and save these children even if we cannot stop secret abortions taking place. Yes, backyard abortions will then be carried out and we should try to close down such activities wherever possible too. We believe it is wrong to go about life as normal while children are being killed in the ‘frontyard’ abortion clinics, so to speak.
You say that “everyone does have the right to make their own choices” – we wouldn’t agree with that. For example, who of us would feel compelled to respect the choice of a rapist to rape a woman, or the choice of a man to murder a born child? There are some choices that some people want to make that none of us believe we have to accept. We see no reason not to place the choice to kill a preborn child into that category. Certainly a woman who is prevented from having an abortion may get very upset and angry with those who would stop her – and they do get angry with us, but is their anger sufficient reason for us to say that therefore they can go ahead and kill their child? Someone who wants to kill a born person may also get very upset and angry if they are stopped from doing so but we would never say that they should therefore be able to commit their intended murder!
What we are trying to do with the rescues is not so much stop a woman from having an abortion as to save the child from being killed. In one respect they may appear to be one and the same thing, but we believe there is an important distinction. Consider this analogy: we may not like to see a woman drinking heavily, but usually (especially if we do not know her) we do not consider that we have a responsibility to interfere directly to try and stop her continuing the drinking. But if the woman is obviously pregnant and expressly says she is drinking heavily so as to try and kill the baby by alcohol poisoning, we may believe we ought to intervene. In such a case we would primarily be intervening not in order to deprive the woman of her desire to drink alcohol, but rather in order to try and save the child’s life. In the same way, at the rescues we are not so much trying to prevent women choosing to have a medical procedure, we are acting to try and stop a child being killed. In the case of the woman drinking excessively we may be uncertain about intervening because we could not be sure that her efforts to poison and kill the child would be effective, but when it comes to abortion it is virtually absolutely certain that her intention to end her child’s life will be fulilled. Why shouldn’t we come to the rescue of children about to be killed?
Certainly we agree with you that change needs to come in women who are seeking abortions. And we are endeavouring to try and see such changes occur – through our efforts to educate the community (LIz and I are also the Qld Coordinators for Right to Life Australia), through the Pregnancy Problem Centre, through the schools’ programme ‘Choices, Decisions, Outcomes’, through churches etc, but in the mean-time while we are waiting for such education efforts to take effect, and also recognising the fact that some women will pursue abortion no matter what is said or offered to them, we believe that we must intervene for those being killed now. We also believe that the rescues are very educative too. These actions are saying to the community that these young lives really are valuable – valuable enough even for people to pay a high price to save them. As the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words. For many years pro-lifers have said that abortion kills children but we have not been acting very consistently with that very strong claim. We believe the rescues give more consistency to our words.
Finally, we are doubtful that the politicians will be successful in making significant changes. Politics is always about compromise, but this is a matter where there can be no compromise. Our community needs to see that ordinary people who say they believe that abortion kills children really believe it before they will be willing to consider for themselves that that claim may be true. I think we have hoped that there would be low cost ways of stopping abortion, but with something as terrible as this we should realise that there will be no cheap solutions.