By DEXTER DUGGAN
Pro-lifers have made a variety of sacrifices over the decades, but it’s rare for one of them to be directly killed — unlike the preborn babies they try to protect. But that was the fate of longtime Member of Parliament and pro-lifer Sir David Amess at Leigh-on-Sea, England, on October 15.
The widely admired Amess, 69, a member of the Conservative Party, was brutally knifed repeatedly just after noon while he met with constituents as he did the everyday duty of a veteran public servant.
How many people had walked up to Amess over the decades to seek help with their problems — until this knifeman astoundingly began slashing with his blade. Gun control would have done no good.
Police arrested 25-year-old Ali Harbi Ali, the British-born son of a family that came from Somalia. He was detained under terrorism legislation. Earlier that day a surveillance camera recorded a thin, somber-looking man believed to be Ali walking along a London sidewalk wearing a jacket, carrying a backpack, and with one hand in his pocket.
After the attack, he reportedly waited calmly to be arrested.
Leigh-on-Sea is about 40 miles east of London and a few miles west of the North Sea.
The British Sun newspaper posted: “Cops and security services are now examining the theory Sir David’s killer was ‘self-radicalized’ online during lockdown. And they believe the suspect may have been inspired by al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda offshoot operating in Somalia and Kenya.”
The UK Guardian reported that a man who was on a Zoom call with Amess just before the attack said, “He was in fantastic spirits, in a real ‘go get ’em’ mood, making loads of jokes.”
The Guardian added that a priest who heard of the attack rushed to the location to provide Last Rites to the Catholic MP, but was blocked by police because this was a crime scene, so the priest prayed the rosary from a distance.
Amess was one of the longest-serving members of Parliament, having entered the body 38 years earlier — well before Ali was born — but had not ascended to a high position in government. Diligently serving his constituents’ needs seemed to satisfy him.
Upon the death of the father of five, tributes flowed freely across the spectrum, including from Muslims in the area. Amess was not a man whose death brought only a few grudging words of respect.
Also, a spokeswoman for the Muslim Council of Britain said its position “is clear in its condemnation of this cold-blooded murder in the strongest possible terms,” and that Amess “was always eager to support mosques and Muslim organizations in their work.”
The Times of Israel ran a 2018 photo of Amess at a Reform synagogue in his district, standing between the flags of Israel and Britain. The news site said, “Amess was the honorary secretary of the Conservative Friends of Israel from 1998, and was regarded as a longtime friend of the UK Jewish community.”
Breitbart News posted on October 15 that Amess was known for “opposing abortion on demand and same-sex marriage long after the Tory leadership had given up such causes as unfashionable — but was nevertheless a popular figure on both sides of the House of Commons.”
Wikipedia reflected other descriptions of Amess’ stands: “He was a devout Catholic and a socially conservative politician who opposed abortion, supported capital punishment, and campaigned in favor of Brexit. In contrast, he also held unusually liberal views on some issues, most notably supporting stronger animal-welfare protections and a ban on fox hunting.”
Five years earlier another member of Parliament, the Labor Party’s Jo Cox, died from being both shot and stabbed repeatedly shortly before she was to meet with some of her constituents. Her attacker reportedly was a right-wing extremist who was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Amess was a longtime supporter of Britain’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), which describes itself as “the oldest pro-life campaigning and educational organization in the world,” founded in January 1967 to oppose the abortion bill then being debated in Parliament.
SPUC issued a statement saying that Amess “worked tirelessly over the years to protect unborn babies and support vulnerable women facing crisis pregnancies, operating within Parliament to forward various pro-life initiatives….
“SPUC’s Antonia Tully, executive director (Research and Education), worked closely with Sir David on a number of pro-life political campaigns for many years,” the statement said. “She said: ‘I can remember Sir David as a young MP in the House of Commons. He was always willing to do whatever he could for SPUC, for example, tabling Parliamentary Questions on our behalf.
“‘During a long career as an MP, Sir David was a stalwart pro-life voter and never reneged on his deeply held views on abortion,’ Tully said, adding:
“‘I have a particular memory, from many years ago, of being part of a studio audience during a live television debate which included a discussion on whether disabled unborn babies should be screened and then aborted. A young Sir David gave a passionate response upholding the right to life of unborn disabled children’.”
When Amess was born in 1952, few would have dreamed that only 15 years later Parliament would legalize permissive abortion — which turned out to be even more permissive than contemplated.
MP David Steel introduced that Abortion Act legislation but years later, as Lord Steel in the House of Lords, expressed opposition to how it was being used. In 2013 the UK Daily Mail quoted him, “It is odd that so many women present for repeat abortions, some more than twice, which does suggest they are treating abortion as contraception. This was never the purpose of the 1967 reform.”
However, the Daily Mail quoted a pro-life spokeswoman: “It was verging on the ingenuous of him to imagine when he brought forward his legislation in 1967 that abortion wouldn’t end up being available on demand. The trouble is that many people think there is nothing wrong with repeat abortions. They say: abortion is either right or wrong, so if you can have one you should be able to have as many as you can ask for.”
As the 1960s began, preborn babies’ lives were recognized in the law based on factors ranging from advancing knowledge of medical science to revulsion against Nazi experimentation and eugenics, subsequently condemned in the Declaration of Geneva, adopted by the World Medical Association in 1948, shortly after WW II ended.
Echoing the ancient Hippocratic Oath’s prohibition of abortion, the declaration said, in part, “I will not permit considerations of religion, nationality, race, party politics, or social standing to intervene between my duty and my patient; I will maintain the utmost respect for human life, from the time of conception; even under threat, I will not use my medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity.”
But before the 1960s were over, permissive abortion was “progressives’” latest unholy grail from out of nowhere, to be forced on nations through the usual tactics.
Having laid out the blood-red carpet for abortion in Britain, pro-abortionists used this as an example to urge permissive abortion on the United States, which the U.S. Supreme Court imposed at the federal level six years later, in 1973 — and which, in turn, was used as an example for other nations.
In November of 1973 SPUC had sponsored a mass lobby of Parliament in which more than 10,000 of the pro-life organization’s members and sympathizers converged on London to meet with their MPs and call to correct Parliament’s huge mistake.
Was a 21-year-old Amess there to take part? If so, perhaps I unknowingly rubbed shoulders with him. I attended and wrote up a long report for the January 1974 issue of National Right to Life News.
I wrote that Parliamentarians back then were saying “Parliament never would have voted for abortion on demand or abortion as a method of contraception or population control, which is what it has become.”
But, then as now, dominant media were on the side of permissive abortion. They devised propaganda that served their agenda by keeping people confused. In this case, the deception included portraying a small group of around 100 pro-abortionists on hand as being equal in size to the pro-lifers.
The morning after the massive lobbying effort, The Times of London carried no news story about it but ran an item in its “Diary” column that failed to provide the vastly different numbers of the two sides but proclaimed: “Both sides had come by coach and plane from all over the country.”
The Times also said that “approximately one-third of the people on either side were men” — without explaining this meant about 3,333 pro-life men versus 33 pro-abortion men, as I wrote back then.
One day these media manipulators who think they’ll just saunter into a luxurious afterlife after all their lies will get a hard reality check at those gates in the clouds which, on the other hand, presumably easily welcomed Amess.
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