Recently, anti-abortion activists in the United States have gained some new allies across the Atlantic. According to an article in Politico, a younger generation of European pro-lifers has turned to the United States for help in advancing their cause.
American pro-lifers see the new European alliance as a matter of necessity. Charmaine Yost, president of Americans United for Life, thinks that any expansion of abortion rights in Europe would pose “a distinct threat to American law,” since American judges could cite European laws as evidence of international consensus in favor of a woman’s right to choose.? For their part, the European activists have turned to the United States for legal and tactical advice in order to bring to the forefront an issue that has long been regarded as a private matter in much of the continent. When Italian pro-life organizer Virginia Coda Nunziante was unable to persuade the main Italian pro-life group to organize an American-style March for Life, she created her own group to organize a march on the Vatican. It attracted only 800 people in 2011, but ballooned to 40,000 last year. As a sign of how quickly it’s grown, Pope Francis addressed last year’s march.
In at least one respect, the European groups have an advantage over the Americans. While the American pro-life movement consists of a patchwork of groups across the country, most European countries have only one clearly dominant pro-life organization. It’s made it somewhat easier to adopt the professionalized and coordinated messaging that is already common here in the United States. For instance, European pro-lifers have begun airing expos’s of abortion providers, as well as stories about women who have come to regret ending their pregnancies. Such tactics have been commonplace in the United States for decades.
The Europeans have had some success in rolling back abortion in some countries. In Norway, the newly elected center-right government has banned most abortions after fetal viability. In Spain, the conservative Popular Party is set to undo the liberal abortion laws passed by the previous socialist government in favor of a near-total ban. The most visible move, however, comes from “One of Us,” a coalition of 20 pro-life groups across the European Union. It recently collected 1.8 million signatures on a petition seeking a ban on all EU funding of anything that would entail the destruction of an embryo. Under the EU’s citizen-petition process, this was enough to force a hearing before the EU’s executive body, the European Commission, which must decide whether to bring it before the European Parliament. As evidence of how close the European and American movements have become, the petition was brought before the European Commission by the European Centre for Law and Justice, an affiliate of Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice.
If the European pro-lifers had been keeping abreast of developments here in the United States, perhaps they would be somewhat warier of working so closely with their American counterparts. For instance, the senior policy advisor for one of the more prominent anti-abortion groups in the United States, Operation Rescue, is Cheryl Sullenger, who tried to blow up a San Diego abortion clinic in 1988. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison. Additionally, her number was found on the dashboard of Scott Roeder, the man who killed abortion provider George Tiller in 2009. She’d been keeping him abreast of Tiller’s court dates. This comes across as an act of poor judgment at best. Sullenger had to have known that Tiller was a marked man, so why would she give information about his court dates to someone who was basically a guy off the street? And yet, as near as can be determined Operation Rescue is still a member in good standing of the “mainstream” pro-life movement. Somehow, you would think associating with a movement that counted someone with Sullenger’s record among its leaders would be a bridge too far for the Europeans.
Additionally, the American pro-life movement was almost unanimous in pushing for Marlise Munoz to be forcibly kept on life support due to her pregnancy, even though the Metroplex-area woman was brain-dead–and therefore, legally dead under Texas law. Due in part to pro-life influence, all four Republican candidates for lieutenant governor of Texas favored keeping Marlise on life support, and at least two and maybe three of them would support a law that would require a brain-dead woman to be kept on life support if she is pregnant–in essence, making it legal to desecrate a corpse. The right to privacy is considered sacrosanct in most of Europe, so it would seem that if it came to light that European pro-lifers were aligning with people wanting to go this far to invade people’s privacy, it wouldn’t play very well at all.
Edited/Published by: SB
Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
