Samuel Morrison: Perhaps this Christmas some of us will reflect on how Northern Ireland has been embraced by spirit of King Herod
On Monday people across the globe will meet with friends and family to celebrate Christmas.
Anti-abortion protesters march to Craigavon Area Hospital in September. They challenged the outrageous overreach of ‘Safe access zones’ outside places where abortions are performed, in which no-one is permitted even to engage in an entirely silent protest. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye
Anti-abortion protesters march to Craigavon Area Hospital in September. They challenged the outrageous overreach of ‘Safe access zones’ outside places where abortions are performed, in which no-one is permitted even to engage in an entirely silent protest. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye
Many have already attended carol services and nativity plays which, in spite of the increasing secularisation of society, remain an important part of the celebrations they associate with this time of year.
While there are aspects of Christmas which make some Christians uncomfortable – greed, gluttony and covetousness are hardly virtues – there can be no denying that people think more about the birth of a Baby in the final weeks of December than at any other time of the year.
I don’t know if that’s what prompted the BBC to choose this week to run online, radio and TV reports about the effectiveness of misnamed ‘safe access zones’ which have been established outside premises which perform abortions in Northern Ireland but I couldn’t help thinking that their timing was somewhat ironic.
‘Safe access zones’ are areas outside places such as hospitals where abortions are performed. Within a ‘safe access zone’ one is not permitted to do anything which could “influence” anyone wishing to undergo an abortion procedure. That “influence” could be an entirely silent protest. It could be someone holding up a sign quoting the sixth commandment. Doing so within a ‘safe access zone’ is criminalised in Northern Ireland.
Such is outrageous overreach by the state.
There have apparently been 50 potential breaches of the legislation since it came into force.
When the matter was debated in the assembly, supporters of the legislation assured us that they were not suppressing freedom of speech or the freedom to protest. Alliance MLA Paula Bradshaw, for example, responded to MLAs saying that the zones suppressed freedom by claiming that in supporting the legislation she was upholding the right to protest because “people can protest, but outside the safe access zones. That is what I will be supporting”.
Yet in the BBC reports this week imagery of posters bearing the words ‘Children should be loved not killed’ and ‘Aborted babies – we will remember them’ outside the exclusion zone at Causeway Hospital were used to argue that the legislation was ineffective.
A platform was then given to politicians calling for the anti-free speech zones to be extended. The problem, going by the imagery in the BBC broadcast and their online report, are signs carrying the message ‘Children should be loved, not killed’ and ‘Aborted babies – we will remember them’.
A third poster linking abortion to the Nazi holocaust was also shown. Tellingly, however, that poster had been removed by the PSNI.
According to some of those interviewed by the BBC the signs which are currently in place are causing people “emotional and phycological damage”.
If a sign simply stating that children should be loved rather than killed causes people phycological damage surely we need to question the morality of what the state has legislated for. Rather than doing that, however, our national broadcaster uses the sign to argue that suppression of speech zones should be extended.
Of course, the position was dressed up again as not suppressing speech but rather claiming that the zones need to be extended to control where and how that right was exercised. However, the imposition of limits on the rights of people to protest against abortion anywhere in Northern Ireland and now calls to extend them should concern everyone who values freedom of speech.
If the logic that a sign as innocuous as ‘Children should be loved, not killed’ is so damaging to people’s emotional and psychological health that it needs to be banned from anywhere within a 250 meter radius of a hospital is accepted, it does not take a huge leap to believe that the time will come when such signs are banned altogether.
Perhaps this Christmas some of us will reflect on the fact that Northern Ireland has been embraced the spirit of Herod who, on failing to discover the infant Christ, sent out an order to slaughter all the young children in Bethlehem. In his account of this incident Matthew quotes from the prophet Jeremiah:
‘In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.’
I venture to suggest that there is more longterm emotional and physiological damage from abortion itself than seeing a poster suggesting that we should love children, not kill them.
Samuel Morrison