Nov. 25, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A four-year-old girl received a gash on her temple from a stone that was hurled by pro-abortion counter-demonstrators during a prayerful demonstration against abortion in Nancy, a town in the North-East of France earlier this month. The demonstration took place on Nov. 16 under heavy police protection in one of the city’s main squares while an “antifascist” counter-protest gathered several hundred feet and attempted to disturb the group’s recitation of the Rosary.
A few dozen pro-lifers had come together, answering the call of “SOS Tout-petits” (SOS Tiny ones), which held over thirty demonstrations in as many towns in France that Saturday for its 27th anniversary.
While most of the pro-life protests were unmolested, a group of extreme-leftist revolutionaries in Nancy organized a picnic on “Place Alliance,” calling on their supporters to prevent the “fundamentalist Catholics” from “reciting their disgusting prayers.”
According to the “antifacist” group La Horde, about 100 activists assembled there for a vegan meal. When the anti-abortion prayers began in early afternoon they started shouting insults, blasphemous slogans and revolutionary chants, and throwing condoms.
They also threw stones and other projectiles at the peaceful prolifers over the heads of the riot police.
At 3 p.m., while the noise and shouting were at their highest, a little girl who was praying with her parents and three siblings was hit with a stone, leaving her bleeding and in tears, trying to hide in her mother’s coat.
A plain-clothes security officer offered to escort the family, from nearby Metz, to their van, but they refused. The father explained later that he had no confidence in the police, having been manhandled by security forces a few months back during the opening ceremony of the Metz tramway because he was waving a flag of the anti-gay “marriage” demonstration, “la Manif pour tous.”
For the same reason, the family refused to lodge a complaint over the affair.
Meanwhile, the Paris reunion of SOS Tout-petits was prohibited by the police at the last minute, without explanation.
Demonstrations in France are subject to declaration at the local prefecture and the authorities are in principle required to take all necessary measures for them to take place freely and safely. According to the law they should only be banned when presenting a grave risk to the public order.
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SOS Tout-petits usually faces no problems during their demonstrations, but this time they were notified shortly before midnight on Friday evening, only hours before the rendez-vous near the Saint-Vincent de Paul hospital in Paris, where most of the capital’s abortions are carried out, that they were banned from holding their demonstration. The prefecture named “risks of violence” as the motive for the ban.
While SOS Tout-petits’ prayerful meetings are consistently peaceful, there had apparently been threats of a counter-protest, triggering the last-minute prohibition of the prolife demonstration. The administrative authorities rejected SOS Tout-petits’ demand for an emergency hearing over the legality of the ban.
Several dozen prolifers, including Dr Xavier Dor, the association’s founder – a frail and nearly blind former pediatrician – decided to demonstrate all the same; many had not even had time to hear about the official ban.
Within twenty minutes they had all been arrested and parked in a police bus near the venue and were held there – even though there was not a single counter-demonstrator to be seen. They were then driven to the local police headquarters for identity checks that were to last an hour and a half.