It’s not exactly a Panzer division, and goose-stepping troops won’t be occupying Warsaw. But a drone equipped to take innocent lives will be sent from Germany into Poland this Saturday. The handiwork of pro-abortion activists trying to undermine the eastern European nation’s pro-life laws, the drone will carry prenatal-murder drugs, which will then be dispensed to pregnant women. As the Guardian reports:
The “abortion drone” will carry World Health Organisation-approved drugs from Frankfurt an der Oder to the Polish border town of Slubice on Saturday, where it will be met by women’s groups who will hand on the pills to those who need them.
The mission is being planned by Women on Waves [WOW], a non-profit group of doctors and activists from the Netherlands. Poland, a strictly Roman Catholic country, is one of the few places in Europe where women can get a legal abortion only if there is proof of rape or incest, the mother’s life is endangered or the foetus is severely malformed.
The group said it had chosen the unusual method of delivery in order to highlight Poland’s restrictive abortion laws.
Amazingly, the Culture of Death Drone (CODD) scheme is supposedly not illegal. As Channel 4 News reports, “In a statement, Women on Waves said: ‘As the abortion drone weighs less than 5kg, is not used for commercial [sic] purposes, will stay within the sight of the person flying it and does not fly in controlled airspace, no authorization is required under Polish or German law.’” Moreover, Polish women taking the CODD’s prenatal-murder drugs won’t be running afoul of the authorities, either. Stated Rebecca Gomperts, a doctor and founder of WOW, “Women who have abortions in Poland are not criminalized; it’s the people who provide the abortions who are acting illegally.”
Yet this raises a question about this weekend’s providers. Perhaps WOW itself has no legal culpability as it’s not operating on Polish soil, but what of “the women’s groups who will hand on the pills to those who need them”? Whether they can or will be held legally accountable has not been reported.
There also could be a question of malpractice. The CODD’s prenatal-murder drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, can be taken only up to nine weeks into a pregnancy. Will the local activists be able to ensure that women closer to delivery won’t be using them?
Yet it appears that what matters most to the abortionists is not the health of women, but ideological conquest. Quartz writes that “campaigners hope it [the CODD] will also deliver a message about inequality,” with “equality” apparently being defined as the embrace of Western European secular values. Of course, these “values” ignore completely the lives of the innocent unborn.
But ideological conquest is not a new ambition for WOW, and the group plans to expand its operations. As Channel 4 News also tells us:
In the past the group have [sic] used a mobile clinic onboard a ship which they dock in countries where abortion is restricted.
[As Gomperts explained,] “We use ships, online apps, our website, anything we can to let women make their own choices on when to have children. The drone can cover some distances and it is affordable — the technology is now available for broader purposes than it was designed. This is a pilot project — we will learn all we can from it and the experience and we will hopefully develop this method as another one of our tools.”
Gomberts [sic] [also] said that should the flight this weekend work out, there is a possibility they could do the same thing in Ireland, where abortion remains very strictly controlled on both sides of the border.
Not surprisingly, the CODD action is justified with the usual rationalizations. As Quartz puts it, “The drone delivery will also make very visible something that happens anyway. Women in countries where abortion is illegal still obtain them.” As to this, and assuming the numbers are accurate, abortionists point out that 50,000 underground prenatal murders are performed annually in Poland. The idea is that there’s no point having laws protecting the unborn because people will violate them anyway.
Of course, this reasoning could be applied to any law. There are approximately 13,000 murders (or, as some might say, extreme late-term abortions) and 3.7 million burglaries a year in the United States, but this doesn’t mean laws criminalizing murder and theft should be stricken from the books. The principle governing whether a law should exist is that it must be just, which is the case when it reflects a moral principle and is government’s domain. And laws against prenatal murder qualify.
Moreover, it’s a bit odd when statists — which abortionists are almost exclusively — express skepticism about the effectiveness of laws; after all, statists believe in law as remedy for every societal ill, real and perceived. One might suppose that if they truly believed their pro-life-law rhetoric, they’d be anarchists (actual ones, as opposed to just the moral variety).
And, of course, laws and their attendant enforcement do influence behavior. For example, it’s rare to find Americans who wouldn’t sometimes drive faster were it not for speed laws. And despite their protestations to the contrary, abortionists tacitly acknowledge this reality with respect to prohibitions against prenatal murder. The Guardian reports Gomperts as lamenting that while wealthy Poles can travel abroad to have prenatal murders performed, poor women are, as she put it, “suffering”; this echoes Barack Obama, mind you, who once said that if women make a “mistake,” they shouldn’t be “punished with a baby.” But what this implies is that pro-life laws do prevent a certain number of prenatal murders.
Moreover, that WOW considers its facilitation of prenatal murder necessary — and in fact plans to expand its operations — also implies that not as many prenatal murders as could occur are occurring. Besides, if the “They’re going to do it, anyway” argument is valid, why do abortionists support laws prohibiting protests in front of abortion clinics?
The truth is that because many pregnant young women are scared, confused, and unsure what decision to make, strong pro-life laws will influence a certain number of them to choose life.
As for WOW’s weekend invasion, Polish pro-life groups have vowed to shoot the CODD down. Whether or not this would be legal has not been reported, but perhaps it doesn’t matter. After all, people will just do what they do, anyway.
Photo of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, Germany (left), and Slubice, Poland
