Podcast Transcript | About Abortion with Dave Brennan
THAT Guardian article. What a pregnancy [REALLY] actually looks like | 8 Nov 2022 | Episode 22
Dave Brennan: Hello and welcome back to this week's About Abortion episode. I'm joined once again by Christian Hacking and we are carrying on our discussion of lies in the public sphere, and the censoring of truth when it comes to abortion. And the title of this week's episode is Cruikshank returns. The Guardian whitewashes a genocide. Now maybe you're asking, “Who’s Cruikshank?” We will introduce him in just a bit. But before we go any further, since we are talking about The Guardian today, which describes itself as fiercely independent, a bastion of the truth, not owned by any sort of oligarch who controls this message. You've got an interesting insight into the behind the scenes working of The Guardian, which I know our listeners have been waiting all week long at the edge of their seats to hear. So tell us.
Christian Hacking: So what is this information? Is that the question you're about to ask?
Dave Brennan: Yeah. Tell us, what are these communications that you unwittingly received?
Christian Hacking: Well, if you were listening last week to this podcast, you will have known that we went on a whistle stop tour of the inner mental workings of MP Stella Creasy. And part of this discussion around free speech and her attempt to repaint what free speech is, and the closing of free speech that she so willingly took part in, in the winter of 2019, was the role of the press to basically spout lies about harassment and intimidation. What happened after the CBR UK campaign was, another group, a political organisation called the Christian Parties Alliance ran their own campaign in Walthamstow. And I had the privilege of receiving a text message from a journalist who was trying to contact Stella Creasy about what this campaign was doing in her area. And let me just share my screen with you. So beeping on my Samsung 5S phone was this:
Now I am delighted to share this with you, a good three years after it was first sent to us, because it really goes to show that these politicians don't operate in a vacuum, that they have media contacts and liaisons, and they work for each other and they work closely with each other. And should it surprise us that The Guardian, who has come up with all kinds of borderline defamation, and slanderous headlines about us, (but not borderline I would argue), should be in cahoots with Stella Creasy in producing more misinformation. The answer is absolutely not.
Because this is the nature of the beast that we're fighting against, which is The Guardian, which at one point really was a guardian of free speech and minority views has just careered so far left that they are on the brink, if they haven't got there, of total insanity. And what you get from them is not the guarding of free speech, the guarding of the news as it is meant to be, but actually just unadulterated lies being pushed, and political agendas, like climate change. Over the summer every single headline I saw of theirs appeared to be some kind of climate change related issue. People's house fires weren't reported as house fires, they were reported as proof of global warming, etc.. And they've also got headlong behind the pro-abortion agenda of which we are exploring the latest manifestation of that in this stuff.
It's also worth noting that The Guardian, because it is donor funded, and that's why you have to read the donor pledge after every article you read with them. They are also susceptible to lots of paid international journalism. So for example, when people were trying to stop abortion pill reversal with Dr. Dermot Kearney (president of the UK’s Catholic Medical Association), basically openDemocracy, that's George Soros’ media wing, was supplying information to journalists, funding journalists who were then submitting it to The Guardian. And The Guardian articles at the time had a kind of little disclaimer saying, “This is funded by open source,” etc..
I see less of those tags nowadays, so maybe they're going more covert in their funding streams. But basically, they’ve not only opened themselves up to political manipulation from global elites, etc, but it seems like they've willingly endorsed a lot of it and, and basically taking their readership on an absolute fool’s errand, really, of which the article that we're going to be looking at today is a prime example.
Dave Brennan: And quite aside from the money trail and, whether anything illegal or untoward is happening at a kind of procedural level, I want people to see and appreciate the significance of the way in which The Guardian is effectively the propaganda arm of the abortion lobby, which is incredibly powerful in Parliament, as well as in, for example, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and the British Medical Association.
Now again, we're still talking mostly about soft totalitarianism here rather than the hard. It’s cultural Marxism, rather than political. So we've seen a takeover of the academies, we're seeing a takeover of the various institutions, largely Parliament and certainly much of the mainstream media. And I happen to think that one of the greatest problems with the UK Church today, practically speaking, is we all too easily believe what the mainstream media says, still. People still listen to the BBC, read The Guardian in particular, uncritically, and repeat what's been said there as if it is fact, as if there is no agenda behind it.
And the piece we're going to show you now, is a really clear example proving that the opposite is true. There, there is a very strong agenda going on here and quite aside from who's paying who, it's clear from that text you showed us, Christian, that Stella is almost acting there as a sort of an informal, unofficial editor for The Guardian, “I'll send it over first thing in the morning and then, once I get the OK from you, I'll publish it by lunchtime”. It's almost ghost writing. It's not in organisational terms the government's newspaper, or the Labour Party's newspaper, or the abortion lobby's newspaper, but in practical terms, that's pretty much what it is.
Christian Hacking: And it's just worth noting someone like Stella Creasy has huge editorial clout. When we did the CPN, we lined up a piece in The Times through the help of some friends of ours. And this very meticulous journalist came out and interviewed me, cross examined me for over an hour, or two, to really get to the facts of the case. And he was due to write some kind of piece, really telling our story, the stuff we affected in the last interview. But when he went to Stella Creasy, everything turned on his head. So an interview about unfair use of local political powers to silence opposition and silence political speech, basically became a headline; ‘MP blasts anti-choice activists’. So she has huge political clout. And when it came to the ‘Stop Stella’ campaign, we were invited to go speak on the BBC or one of these other kind of mainstream media outlets, and I think Stella refused to be on a panel with us. So she really has a very powerful right of veto, and is very respected in these circles, meaning that so many of her ideas can't be publicly challenged. And so she keeps a real tight editorial grip on lots of her content. So that's another example of all of that. Anyway, do you want me to share the article?
Dave Brennan: So let me introduce this. So what we're going to show people now, and actually showing might not work so well, we'll talk people through it and give a summary. But this is an article that came out about a week or two ago. So, again, timing interesting, seemed to coincide with abortion debate generally, but in particular the buffer zones thing. And for those who are watching on YouTube, you can see this on our screen share, but for those who are just listening, let me just describe it to you. So this is an article that has the title ‘What a pregnancy actually looks like before 10 weeks – in pictures’, and it introduces the issue of Roe v Wade and so on and says that the issue is we very rarely see what pregnancy tissue, at early stages, looks like.
There's a series of pictures, which we're scrolling through just now, which mysteriously feature white blobs of tissue, which are totally undiscernible. You can't tell what these things are. They almost look like it could be larvae, it could be anything, through various stages of pregnancy. So four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, and so on. And there's a ruler next to it for scale. And purportedly, this is showing what pregnancy tissue actually looks like. Now, in none of these can you see anything resembling a human embryo. And that point is repeatedly made in the text.
(See images below)
(Photos: Dr. Joan Fleischman, MD, MPA/MYA Network)
You can't see anything here that looks anything like a foetus. I think ten weeks might be as far as it goes. So most abortions are taking place around the ten week mark or slightly later. It’s worth noting that this is gestational stage measured from LMP. So that is from the last menstrual period. So if you want the age of the unborn from fertilisation, you have to take away about two weeks from each of these measurements. So many people will measure pregnancy from LMP, but it's two weeks later when fertilisation actually takes place now.
Christian Hacking: Well, that's an average. The point about last menstrual period is the pregnancy can take place at any point from the last menstrual period to your next menstrual period. So the aging of them from last LMP could be entirely misleading because that baby could either be a few days old, or it could be four weeks old. And this is something I think we'll examine in a moment, when we look at the MYA Network, and you'll see just their methodology and how skewed it is in making this point.
Dave Brennan: And that's why CBR UK and other organisations deliberately use from fertilisation dating because it's far more accurate, because that's actually measuring from when that life has begun, whereas LMP is notoriously inaccurate because of the discrepancy of when fertilisation may have taken place, as well as just irregularity of periods and so on. So, that's why we always date from fertilisation. And they don't hide that fact, they do explain their dating system there. But aside from that, this is just astonishingly, and deliberately misleading. The claim, and I'll just read out a couple of quotes here from the article is they've got no axe to grind, no political agenda. They're not for abortion or against abortion. They say this:
“We're just putting out the information and the facts to counter the misinformation”.
And by that, and they refer to this explicitly, e.g. images of human embryos where you can actually see the embryo, where you can actually see the hands, the feet, the eyes, and so on. That's what they're calling misinformation. And these images they are showing are the accurate images. We'll go on that in a minute. They carry on to say:
“This is not something that's scary or dangerous or violent. It's just a picture of something that's in your body.”
So in one line, they contradict themselves. They say they've got no agenda, they just pay out the information. But then they clearly give away their purpose. Their purpose is to try and make it seem like there's nothing violent going on here. It's not scary or dangerous. Of course, the opposite is true. So-called abortion is an act of violence. It's the poisoning or tearing apart of an unborn child. And it's this reality they have so deliberately concealed with these images. There's a lot that's bizarre about these images. One is the fact they're white, so clearly they've got rid of the blood somehow, which is interesting. Because if they're trying to depict what a woman is likely to see after an early stage medical abortion, it's not going to be white! There's going to be a lot of blood there. But they've also managed to conceal the unborn child, which we know is clearly discernible and visible certainly in those later eight, nine, ten weeks. Very clearly. Still small, but very clearly a baby. So, Christian, can you explain what's going on here? Are these images totally made up? What have they done to produce these?
Christian Hacking: Well, the best way to answer is to go back to the article, and you'll see early on, from the third paragraph in the article:,
“These images supplied to us by the MYA Network”.
And it's got a hyperlink here. So if I click on that hyperlink, it goes through to the MYA website about the issue of tissue, and it has this lady with a video describing herself as a family doctor. And it starts with the question: “Do you know what early pregnancies actually look like?” What's really interesting is if you go further down the page you start to pick up what the agenda may be behind this. And in regard to what this organisation is about, it's got these quotes:
“It didn't look human like what you see in the apps. I felt a sense of ease.” wrote one person.
Sophomore and Grandma wrote “It wasn't what I expected at all. It was so small and seemed a lot less scary.”
We Were Comforted wrote “It just looked like mucus. It was just a little thing. …nothing that made us feel guilty.”
And finally, Religious Conflict wrote “Being able to look at what it actually is removed all the scariness and the guilt.”
OK, so as far as this article is neutral, it is not. This website is as charged as a Tesla on a front porch after a full night being plugged into the socket. And this is when it gets really remarkable. If you scroll down to the FAQs on the page, I going to read them. It starts answering a bunch of questions:
“What is pregnancy tissue?” “What is a gestational sac?” “What is an embryo?” This is when it gets really interesting.
“An embryo is a cluster of cells that can develop into what we call a foetus in 8 – 10 weeks of pregnancy”.
Clear dehumanising, a deconstructing of the fact that an embryo is a distinctive, living and whole human being. It's got its own genetic code. But this is where it gets really, really interesting.
It says: “What does the tissue look like inside prior to being removed? The picture above shows you what the tissue of early pregnancy looks like. When this tissue is removed during an in-office procedure it looks the same, but we also see some of the menstrual lining (“decidua”) and some blood.”
Interesting. So it talks about these vacuum aspirations using what is probably a handheld pump. It keeps on referring to them as in-office. I don’t know what point they're trying to make there.
It says: “How was the tissue removed?” It talks about a “manual uterine aspiration” here.
“The procedure itself takes only about 5 minutes and does not require surgery or medicines to put the patient to sleep.”
OK. But it does often require a painkiller injected around the cervix, so a number of details are missed out there. It also requires the stretching of the uterus to get in using a series of tools. It can sometimes require pre-prep, the insertion of a seaweed material that expands with moisture and again, widens the cervix. So there a breaking and entering here that's totally ignored, but this is perhaps the most pertinent point. One of the questions:
“I took abortion pills and it didn't look like this. Why?”
OK. And now this is the key detail, which really is the giveaway of this whole agenda here. It says:
“We rinsed off the blood and removed the menstrual lining (decidua) in preparation for these photos. What you see here is the gestational sac alone.
If you are taking abortion pills at home or having a miscarriage, what you see will look different. Most people will experience a heavy period which may include blood clots of varying sizes, so it can be difficult to see the pregnancy tissue unless you purposefully look for it. If you are over 9 weeks pregnant and choose to look, you may see an early embryo.”
OK, so it sounds from their methodology, like what they've done is they've literally washed away the baby and any other blood clots that could have the baby inside, and then they have clearly presented it in a petri dish. So all you're really seeing is the gestational sac and any evidence of an embryo or life, etc., is either washed away or it's been reduced and minimised by not using magnification. And, this is what was one of the most interesting quotes for me in article was this quote further down the page. I'm going to read it out for those who are listening on the podcast. It says further down the page, it says:
“This image shows the decidua tissue to support the pregnancy and the gestational sac, which would eventually become the amniotic sac, which supports the foetus.”
So they've made this distinction between the sac and the foetus. OK. “If we look closer under a microscope, would we see more human qualities?”
To which this Dr. Fleischman says, “If you zoom in on anything, including sperm and an egg getting fertilised, it's just an incredible thing to watch. But that's different from the everyday ways we see life. That perspective, to me, is the most relevant. It is somehow absent from our consciousness.”
So let's show people images of gestational sacs that have been washed away, potentially washed away the baby. And when asked, “Well, what happens if you zoom in?” Well, that's irrelevant because that's not what you can see with the naked eye. So how does that have any moral significance? It's the same argument to say if I fire a missile, I may not see the destruction it does 400 miles away. But what matters is what I can see with my naked eye. It's totally flawed, even from a human perspective. Introduce God's perspective, and we know God is not made in our image. We know God sees things very differently to how we see things. We know that the very thought of adult adultery is an act of adultery. The act of getting angry is an act of murder. So certainly in God's book, the fact that we can't see it with our naked eye, I don't think takes away any moral culpability here.
So again, we've got layers upon layers of deception, distortion, and this stuff is being played out in the public sphere. What was that story you told me - didn't somebody actually reference this particular article?
Dave Brennan: Yes, I was going to come onto that actually. So we were doing a display in Norwich just the other day. And someone had clearly just seen this article and they were claiming that our pictures were fake, because she'd seen what pregnancy actually looks like, and she's referencing this article. She said, “It looks nothing like what you are showing.”
So it just shows the impact it has when a trusted newspaper, a mainstream media outlet rolls this stuff out claiming, “Here's the truth, don't listen to the people on the other side.” So it's very impactful. And clearly, on the website, those who were able to see might have noticed one of the tabs at the top is called ‘Abortion Normalised’. So clearly that is the agenda here. It's to make abortion not a big deal. So if zooming in and showing what's really there makes it feel like a big deal, we won't do that. If leaving the blood in the picture makes it a big deal, let's not do that. And they say that again in the article. It says showing this tissue in the way that they've prepared it and doctored it:
“Showing this tissue can be a relief to patients”. “For those who choose to look at the tissue, you can literally feel the tension come down. People have been on this emotional roller coaster. And they’re like, ‘You’re kidding. This is all that was?’”
So this is clearly the agenda here. It's to try and normalise abortion. It's the kind of visual equivalent to what you see in the verbal descriptions, so-called, of abortion by the providers. They say, “Look, it's just a gentle suction to remove the pregnancy. It's over in five minutes. Most people are ready to go home the same day”, etc.. It's designed to trivialise, it's designed to normalise, and it is quite literally whitewashing a genocide. They've washed away the blood and they've concealed the humanity of the baby, which we know so clearly, quite aside from what we can see with the naked eye, with the technology we do have, we can see sophisticated life at very early stages, which they even pretty much admit, when they say, well, if you look very closely, you will see the embryo there. We know there's a life there. We know the heart's beating from three weeks after fertilisation. We know there's a fingerprint from ten weeks after fertilisation, whether we can see that with the naked eye or not. But the whole agenda here is to whitewash the genocide and try and say, “Look, this is just a bit of tissue, there's, there's no killing going on here.”
Now the thing I want to introduce to people, is a very interesting comparison point, because what we're seeing here from The Guardian is a very elaborate, ornate lie. They're not just lying about what the unborn child looks like, they're also lying about the people who are telling the truth. They're calling that misinformation, and in fact, they're weaving this really rich tapestry, this kind of narrative.
Christian Hacking: You're making it sound like you could buy this thing in a charity shop. It's an ornate lie. It's a precious lie. It's a delicious lie. You're right though, it has this aesthetic appeal to it. It is a piece of work. It's a crafted piece.
Dave Brennan: It's incredibly well crafted. It's thought through, because of course, if you’re going to do a really effective lie, you have to also explain how the other people are lying. You have to do your homework on that side and explain why their methods are wrong, they've got the wrong motives, how their pictures are the real fake images and so on. And so they've had to work overtime to make their lies as plausible as possible.
And what's really interesting is we see a very exact parallel about what we're talking now with that of just over 200 years ago, with regards to the transatlantic slave trade. So what we're going to do is we're going to introduce this Cruikshank cartoon to people, who was a cartoonist, a satirist in the 1820s. So this is all about anti-slavery, not abolition of the slave trade, but actually anti-slavery. And Cruikshank was a famous cartoonist who was clearly in favour of the status quo. He was quite comfortable with slavery and the cartoon that he produced has a very similar sort of tactic at play to what we've seen The Guardian are doing here. So this is a two minute clip of David Olusoga analyzing this cartoon for us. Here is the picture itself.
So I'm just going to play this now for us, and then we're going to see how at various points what's going on is extremely similar to the tactics at play with The Guardian.
“This is a satirical characture by George Cruikshank, who is satirist of the early 19th century.
The title is ‘John Bull taking a clear view of the Negro slavery question!’, and this is his image of two halves really. On the right is the Caribbean, luxuriating under the tropical sun, and on the left is Britain. Beside John Bull, is poor Pat, who is an English labourer, who's unemployed and hungry. No one's taking any notice of Pat because everybody in England in Cruikshank’s image is focusing on the issue of slavery.
Behind him is an abolitionist, a thin, humorless looking man who's encouraging children to sign petitions. The petition was the favoured, the ingenious campaigning tool of the abolitionist movement, and here Cruikshank’s implying that people who are signing the petitions are young and naive, don't really understand the issues, and they can't vote anyway, so their opinions don't really matter.
The only person in this painting who's not looking at the abolitionists is John Bull himself, who's looking through this telescope, which is in theory pointing towards the Caribbean. But what he's really seeing is a propaganda picture, a picture of a slave being whipped that's been pushed in front of the telescope by another of the abolitionists.
And John Bull is again, like everybody else, shocked at this supposed horror of slavery. But the reality that Cruikshank wants us to consider on the other side of the Atlantic, in the Caribbean is a world which the black slaves aren't repressed or beaten or tortured or whipped, but they're cavorting under the sun, they've clearly been drinking rum. They're chubby and overweight because they're so well fed. What George Cruikshank is essentially saying, is that by becoming obsessed with the supposed horrors of Negro slavery, the country's taking its eye off the people that really it should care about, which are the poor and the unemployed and the destitute of Britain itself. And that this vision, this image of slavery that the abolitionists have pushed and rammed down everyone's throats is a myth.”
Well, there we have it. Some really interesting points of comparison there that I want to pick up on. So, we'll put the link to that in the show notes so people can follow that up. Really recommend taking a closer look at that. And what you can see is there's real effort there, isn't there, to demonise the abolitionists, to point out their disingenuous tactics. They're targeting vulnerable, impressionable people, trying to get kids to sign their petitions and of course that's really an ad hominem isn't it. It’s trying to suggest these are dishonest people who will use any means, even exploiting vulnerable children, to advance their cause. Which of course is just one other way of diverting the attention away from the real injustice, which is in that case, slavery, and saying, “Look, the real crooks here are the abolitionists who are using these untoward tactics.”
Christian, did you notice any other things?
Christian Hacking: Well, that's very interesting, the kind of humorless gaunt, tall abolitionists, trying to get the petition signed. I can imagine you being drafted in that way within another few years. Huge ad hominem attacks. Very interesting that this sense of misleading the population, the African people, the Negros as they were called at the time, they’re fine, they're doing great. It's only these evangelicals who are trying to make us feel bad about what's happening to them. I think that was very clearly portrayed and clearly it's exactly the same today.
What did one of the quotes say on that website? It said, “I looked, I didn't feel sad. It wasn't what I expected.” That website is trying to get people to look across the shore at these white, gestational sacs and say, “There's nothing to cry about here. There's no harm being done. There's no damage being done.”
And very interesting about the kids, right? I spoke to a pro-abortion academic yesterday. And I asked her, because I wanted to get an accurate figure for the March for Life that happened in September this year. And I thought, no better person to ask than a pro-abortion academic for the count, beause I know she stands there and she counts the people as they go past. And I said, how many people were there? And she said, “Well, it's hard to say because we don't count the kids.” And I said, “Why don't you count the kids?” And she said, “Because we don't think the kids are fully consenting to be on the march.” So again, it's the same idea that clearly, although it wasn't stated emphatically by this person, it’s like you've got a bunch of wacko obsessed Christians on this pro-life issue, and they just bolster their numbers by dragging their kids along to these marches, and their kids don't even know why they're there. Again, it's all the same stuff, just being dressed in Primark, whereas it used to be 18th century clothing. And so the parallels are very similar.
Dave Brennan: And the charge that we are ignoring the real problems of the day. What are you doing about foster care or the climate, or are you vegetarian? Or whatever it might be. It's trying to suggest that this whole baby genocide thing is just a total waste of time. There are real problems we need to get on with. And again, a very similar distraction tactic.
Christian Hacking: What's very interesting about that particular point is obviously, unlike the slave trade, which was happening in the Caribbean and was happening far away, abortion is happening in our country, in these 360 clinics, in women's homes, as of March 2020. So it is on our territory. How do they get around this? They try to claim it's some American import. “Look over at America, look over at America. You don't want the UK to become like those kind of American pro-lifers!” So again they've had to work hard on that because obviously there is a very British argument to be made that killing babies at home - one in 17 women going to hospital is not good for British women. It's not good for the British next generation. The NHS is paying for each abortion procedure and then having to pick up the cost of cleaning up the mess, again is not very good for British taxpayers, etc. So how do they get around that? Well, let's keep on talking about how this is a real American thing, and these are just American tactics, American imports, even though the Americans that we speak to were inspired by the abolitionists in how they actually combat abortion in America.
So the idea here is it's a basically strong emotional kick in the gut. It's not so much about the facts. It's not so much about getting to the truth. It's just pulling together various threads and pounding them into our gut. And I think that this Guardian article really has that effect. It's kind of like, “Whoa, these people on the streets, they are totally misleading me”. It’s a very visceral, emotional reaction that it's designed to trigger, and it does so very effectively, just like the Cruikshank picture that we just watched.
Dave Brennan: There's an interesting little detail that Olusoga didn't pick up on there, but there's an abolitionist putting up a poster or something, urging people not to buy sugar from the West Indies, but to buy East Indian sugar because that was not slave sugar. And the cartoonist Cruikshank has placed in that abolitionist’s pocket, visibly, a sort of an invoice from the East India company, suggesting that he's in the pay of these India company to promote their sugar over West Indian sugar. And so of course the insinuation is these guys are doing it for the cash, they're being paid, their motives are not pure. And we hear exactly the same thing today. People claiming that we're handsomely remunerated by far right wing American Trump supporters, and so on.
Which is funny because I would happily place a bet on every single one of those people who has made such a charge. I would happily bet that they are paid far more than any of us. These journalists are handsomely paid, Stella Creasey’s doing all right in Parliament on the MP's wages. And the idea that we're in this for the money is laughable, and yet so desperate is the pro-abortion lobby, and so weak are their arguments, this is the kind of thing they will resort to.
Christian Hacking: It's worth noting, I did start this podcast by talking about some of the funding streams for The Guardian and how that opens them up to some of these political agendas. So I don't want to just be flinging mud back or throwing lies back, but abortion costs between £300 and £500 to the NHS every time you do it. So the ‘not-for-profit’ organisations that do abortions are benefiting financially from them. And of course, people like openDemocracy and George Soros are using the multimillion pounds that he's acquired as a head fund manager to fund very left wing agendas of which abortion is part of them. So, there is money changing hands and there are money streams that are taking place, and that can be evidenced. The question is, which ones can be evidenced and which ones can't? And just like in the days of the abolition, the slave trade lobby had a huge amount of money and they were paying people like George Hibbert, who supposedly went to the same church as Wilberforce, to be a voice for the slavery lobby within Parliament.
And likewise, we see civil servants, people like Andrea Duncan and Isabelle Stevens, people who have either formally worked for large abortion providers or potentially could have worked in both places, now working in the civil service, forwarding the abortion agenda within of government.
So the question is, where's the evidence and where does the evidence lead? And clearly it's not a multimillion pound business to be defending unborn babies in the United Kingdom. And if these buffer zones come in, the lot of us could end up having criminal records. It's not in favour, and it doesn't enjoy the renumeration that institutional injustice historically always has.
Dave Brennan: But as you say, the key thing here, aside from the purity of people’s motives and so on, is what is the reality here? And the very powerful deception we see in the Cruikshank cartoon, and in The Guardian article, is they put forward a very compelling case for saying “Look, here’s the reality. This is the real deal and there's nothing to see here, folks. There's nothing violent going on. There's no problem here. You can feel good now.”
It's a sort of satanic lullaby. It's sort of putting you to sleep. “There's no issue here. It's OK”. And in order to do that they have to construe the other side as the fear-mongerers, the mis-informers, and so on, and so they want to say that the likes of Wilberforce, they're the ones telling the lies, that, as David Olusoga said at the end there, it's a myth, this idea of slaves being badly treated, it's just a myth. Phew, what a relief. It's just a myth, I was worried I was going to have to do something about it. So it's really this kind of putting people to sleep. And of course people are all too willing to accept that because it lets them off the hook. It's very easy, it's very convenient to be given the sort of rationale to say there's nothing wrong with what we are doing as a nation. It really does make things a lot easier and so you see people swallowing this very quickly. But seeing something visually, they say “seeing is believing”, it's a very powerful way of getting people to believe that they've got the inside track.
Like this girl we spoke with in Norwich the other day. She said, “No, I just saw it. I've seen it in the paper. So I've seen what pregnancy really looks like and it doesn't look like that.” So I think a quote attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister from a long time back, it's attributed to him, whether he said at first, who knows?
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics."
The point he was making was that statistics can be manipulated and can even give cover for a bad argument, but we're seeing something similar here with pictures. Lies, damned lies, and pictures! Because the moment someone's seen a picture, they think they've seen it. Now they might have, it could be an accurate picture or it could be a fiction, like what Cruikshank did with this sort of West Indian utopia, with all these slaves living happily ever after, and so a diligent propagandist such as we see here represented by The Guardian, has to make out the other side to be the propagandists and it's working.
I can't really show this to you very easily, but one of our boards was vandalised in Norwich the other day, and I won't read everything that was said on it because it's probably not suitable for public airways. But what they have put in front of our warning sign, (saying there was going to be abortion related imagery up ahead. In fact, in this case it was just living human embryos, foetuses.) But in front of where it says ‘Abortion related imagery ahead’, it says, ‘fake’ abortion imagery ahead and then also says ‘scare mongering’ on the side.
So this is exactly the same thing. We are that guy sticking the placard in front of the telescope in Cruikshank’s cartoon. The insinuation is that we are the fear mongers. We're the ones making up a problem where it isn't. We are exaggerating the problem. The reality is over the water there, and you can see they're doing absolutely fine. Can I wrap us up, Christian?
Christian Hacking: Yeah, absolutely. Please do. All I was going to say was, it's images like this, the Cruikshank image, The Guardian article, it absolves the conscience and it protects the industry. That’s what they do. They make people think, “Oh, I've got nothing to be concerned about here”. And all the while the industry will carry on going. And that's why effective social reform strategy and effective anti-abortion strategy does the opposite. It does affect the conscience and it hinders the industry. And that's what we should be aiming for. And if more articles like this come out, then we can probably construe or surmise that we are actually having an influence. People are having to put money behind correcting what we are doing, or turning what we're doing into a myth. So in one sense it is a kind of compliment.
Dave Brennan: And the stakes are getting higher, aren't they? Because injustice has to thrive on darkness, lies, deception, and of course the more the injustice is exposed, the harder it is for the deception to hold fast. So what you're seeing is the abortion lobby is resting on this ever growing sort of air-cushion of deception, and it's getting bigger and bigger, and more and more complicated and more and more precarious. And when it is finally popped, it's going to be so shaming for those who've helped to build up that castle in the sky because it's so clearly a lie.
One day we'll be looking back on this Guardian article as we just look back on Cruikshank’s cartoon. We'll think, “Goodness, how did someone of any public standing get away with such brazen propaganda?” Even in the 1820s, about 30 years or more after the abolition movement started of the slave trade, even then trying to cling on to this idea, this myth, this convenient lie that there was no injustice at all.
I'm reminded of Isaiah 30 v10:
‘They say to the seers, “See no more visions!” and to the prophets, “Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions.’
‘Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.’
And that's exactly what's going on here in this article. The propaganda is saying it's the truth and it's calling the truth propaganda. It's taking the myth, calling it reality, and calling the reality myth. And it can be quite disorientating. But we need to see through it, because as we saw on the streets just the other day in Norwich, in particular young people, these teenagers being sold this convenient lie, which leads right down to the pit. We know that being in the dark as to what abortion is makes abortion itself far more likely.
When people see it for what it is, many change their minds and choose life. So it is critical. In this post-truth world where people can even publish doctored images and claim that they are the real accurate information, again, it behoves us as people of truth to stand up and counter that with reality.
Well, thank you everyone for listening. Again, please do share this with others. Help people to see through the lies of the media because they are lethal, and help people to see how The Guardian, and others, are whitewashing a genocide.
