(en) Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland) - Members of the WSM took part in the Belfast Feminist Network?s counter demonstration against Precious Life?s annual Christmas Caroling.

Precious Life?s event was advertised as an ??Empty Manger? Candle-light Carol Service? 
outside the Marie Stopes Clinic in Belfast City Centre for ?missing babies? ? babies 
?missing? due to abortion we assume. ---- This event was extremely insensitive and 
triggering for people who genuinely wanted a baby this Christmas but are without due to 
miscarriage, stillborn, postnatal afflictions or any other reason. None of these cases 
were taken into account by Precious Life, adding to the argument that as soon as the child 
is out of the womb they no longer care for it. ---- The counter demonstration involved 
members of the Belfast Feminist Network arriving next to them with a sound system playing 
songs related to feminism or choice. Some taking part in Precious Life?s event were 
enraged by this and demanded that the PSNI shut our counter demonstration down ? this did 
not happen. Those in Precious Life left the scene with chants telling the ?anti-woman, 
anti-gay, anti-choice bigots? to "go away".

Precious Life is the same organisation responsible for harassing people entering the Marie 
Stopes Clinic. Their levels of harassment are so high that their glorious leader, Bernie 
Smyth, has been banned from going 20 yards to the building for 5 years, sentenced to 100 
hours of community service and ordered to pay Marie Stope?s director, Dawn Purvis, ?2,000 
as compensation. Smyth, however, deluded with her own self-importance, ignored this ruling 
and continued to harass people yesterday outside the building.

Precious Life are so audacious as to think that they have the right to question anyone who 
walks into the building. They think that they are carrying out a higher power?s task by 
harassing people who may already be considerably distressed. People enter Marie Stopes for 
a multitude of reasons; some in crisis situations, the last thing they want is an 
interrogation by hostile strangers.

It is clear that there is a war on anyone who can bear a child on this island. The recent 
case in the south of the clinically dead pregnant woman shows that the state literally 
sees women as incubators. Pregnant people in the south don?t even have the right to a 
natural death now. It is inhumane to keep a clinically dead person alive to be used merely 
as an incubator until the foetus is viable. Delivering a baby when it is viable, 24 weeks, 
is a bad idea in most situations, never mind when the mother is brain dead. If this child 
is born, it will only have a 50% chance of survival, alongside life support and a high 
chance of severe disability.

Banning abortion is irresponsible; it does not eradicate the want for abortion it only 
leads to pregnant people being put in extremely difficult situations. For the middle-class 
it?s an inconvenience for them to travel to England but to the working class it opens up a 
whole range of issues. For migrant women on this island who cannot travel to England - and 
even if they could they would also have an incredibly hard time traveling - the situation 
is a living nightmare, as was experienced by Ms Y this summer when she desperate enough to 
try to access an abortion under the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act.

The so-called ?pro-life? movement are not to be found at anti-war rallies; they?re absent 
from the fight for anyone who wants to have a child but cannot afford one; they are not to 
be found at any protests against cuts that will seriously impact the standard of living of 
all; and not a peep is to be heard from them about homelessness. The results of their 
stance and the affect it has on the law in certain parts of the world is 48,000 women a 
year dying from an unsafe abortion; that is not humane. Denying someone a choice over 
their own body, over their own life is abusive and wrong, and no lies that they can come 
up with, no pseudo-intellectual babble will change that.
The governments on this island are made up of misogynistic cowards. They are doing the 
women on this island a disgraceful disservice by denying us the right to choose. Marie 
Stopes, however limited it may be, is making up for that; many women do not see it as a 
?place of darkness, misery and despair?, as Precious Life put it. We see it as a safer 
space, a place of understanding and hope that some day we will have a choice over our own 
bodies. For now; the fight for reproductive freedom continues.

https://www.facebook.com/WorkersSolidarityMovement/posts/1027347000624446