THE international pro-abortion movement is marching across Europe to erase any existing restrictions on terminations and capture more women and girls than ever before. It has its sights fixed first on the European Union, then the UK, and then on to the rest of the world.
In the UK medical, as opposed to surgical, abortions have become increasingly common during the Covid pandemic, with the Conservative government and the NHS authorising and paying for ‘abortions at home’ through telemedicine services and remote appointments.
‘Eligible clients are able to take both pills for medical abortion up to 10 weeks in their own homes, without attending a clinic.’ Mandatory counselling before the act and clinical follow-up have gone.
Seen as progress by pro-abortion activists, a government consultation on whether to make this ‘more modern’ ‘less patriarchal’ service permanent closed at the end of February.
The European Parliament will vote at the end of June on whether to accept recommendations contained in the Matic Report, which is a comprehensive attack on EU countries’ current social and sexual mores and threatens the lives of millions of unborn babies.
The intellectual co-author of the report is Neil Datta, Secretary and ‘founder’ of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF), a Brussels-based network of MEPs engaged in ‘defending sexual and reproductive human rights in Europe and around the world’.
Seed funding for this organisation came from the International Planned Parenthood Federation European Network (IPPF), a subsidiary of the U.S. based global abortion giant, Planned Parenthood (PPFA). The operation continues to receive funds from the usual band of happy brothers – including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organisation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and, of course, the United Nations Foundation.
Datta is an unelected bureaucrat, with an extraordinarily wide and influential reach. He has previously called pro-life opponents of abortion ‘extreme Right’ and ‘fascists’, and claimed there is a Vatican-sponsored plot to threaten the egalitarian ‘values and ideals’ of the European Union.
Previously the European co-ordinator of IPPF, Datta, rather unusually holds five nationalities (British, French, Indian, US and Canadian) and is bilingual English/French.
He is combative and has had run-ins with many pro-life groups. He was recently sued by the Ordo Iuris Institute, a Polish conservative legal foundation, after he spoke in the European Parliament on 24 February 2021, accusing them of creating ‘LGBT-free zones’ and ‘promoting the legalisation of domestic violence’.
He has also crossed swords with the American Center for Law and Justice, whose chief counsel was Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow.Datta described that group’s pro-life advocacy activities as hate ‘crusades against women’s and LGBT rights’.
He warned his EU chums: ‘I think many people, including decision makers, should be very alarmed that US Christian right organisations are exporting their outdated views to Europe and are trying to influence European courts.’
Among many other contentious issues, Datta’s Matic report seeks to elevate abortion to a ‘human right’: a bizarre inversion of morality and logic, as all abortions deny at least one party that most basic human right – the right to life.
The report denounces all existing pro-life laws within Europe as discriminatory and outdated and claims that protecting human life from conception is ‘a form of gender-based violence’. It urges that all E.U. States ‘remove and combat all obstacles to legal abortion’.
If passed, Matic will be used to promote and enforce abortion from conception to ‘near birth’: it will permit abortion and contraception for girls ‘regardless of age,’ without parental consent, and using taxpayers’ money.
It will also abolish the right to conscientious objection protections for medical practitioners, making it impossible for pro-life doctors and nurses to work in EU health systems while standing against abortion.
The proposal is that any medic who refuses to be involved in abortion services would be assessed as denying ‘access to medical care,’ a prima facie breach of professional duty. So, any doctor or nurse who withdrew from abortion service, at any stage, would risk his or her career.
Abortion is not the only issue that the report deals with. Matic seeks to interfere with the sovereignty of EU Member states by introducing standardised mandatory sex education, with LGTBQI+ involvement in schools, and children from primary school age exposed to gender theory (pdf) without informing their parents or requiring their consent.
Equally radical, it advocates a legal right for minors to obtain puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgeries, also without parental consent; also to be paid for by public funds.
Datta is confident that the Matic Report will be accepted by EU members as it follows logically from the majority acceptance of the 2013 Estrella Report on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR), and the 2014 Lunacek Report that developed the ‘EU roadmap against homophobia and discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity’. Those protections have undoubtedly contributed to the rise in transgenderism and other ‘queer’ ideologies throughout Europe.
What seems odd is how contradictory the expansion of European Human Rights Law is to the status of the foetus. AsPaul Marx writes in The Death Peddlers War on the Unborn, every aspect of humanity has been identified, codified, and judged worthy of equality before the law, except the unborn child, who is discounted due to lack of maturity.
In principle, there is nothing to prevent other deficiencies being sufficient to make other humans expendable. Enslavement of black people was founded on a denial of their full humanity; Nazi atrocities resulted in the death of six million innocent Jews, classified as sub-human; and we have witnessed what has happened to the old during Covid-19.
You might hope that there might be some collective memory which would prevent EU legislators from excluding preborn children from the human race and dressing up their deaths as ‘women’s health and reproductive rights’.
That said, the Matic report has already been approved by absolute majority of the predominantly female Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality of the European Parliament (FEMM).
The European Parliament appears to be under intense pressure from international groups to conform to the abortion agenda and pro- life activists fear that parliamentary members will capitulate, even in the face of the express opposition and values of their voters.
The outcome will hang on the votes of the European People’s Party, the largest in the European Parliament, and although supposedly centre-right, it is reported to be deeply divided on these issues.
