LONDON, England, April 11, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A U.K. sidewalk counsellor schooled a pro-abortion vigilante on the realities of coerced abortion in London during a BBC radio interview.
Clare McCullough, director of the pro-life Good Counsel Network, and Anna Veglio-White, founder of pro-abortion Sister Supporter, squared off on the radio show on Tuesday. The subject of the interview was the Ealing Council’s vote to ban any pro-life witness or offer of help within 100 metres of the Ealing, London Marie Stopes abortion business.
Veglio-White complained that pro-lifers ask women “not to do it,” offer rosaries, and stand by both gates to the clinic “so that women can’t avoid them.”
McCullough said she was glad Sister Supporter had “moved on” from claiming her group called women murderers and blocked the gateways.
“The women that we’re speaking to are being offered leaflets, offered help,” McCullough explained. “We’re seeing hundreds of women accepting this help. These are women in the most vulnerable situations, who have no alternative but abortion: immigrants, overstayers, victims of domestic violence who don’t have rights to go to [shelters].”
“We’re telling them they have alternatives if they want.”
After Veglio-White engaged McCullough in a spat over the leaflets’ warnings that abortion may carry breast cancer risks, the Good Counsel Network supporter underscored how women are often forced to undergo abortions at Marie Stopes.
“Over 500 women who have turned around outside … have told us the abortion centre offers no other alternative but abortion. They had no choice. Many of them had nowhere to live. Many of them had nothing to eat if they didn’t have the abortion. So we’re there for both of them [mother and child],” she said.
The interviewer couldn’t understand the connection between not having anything to eat and having an abortion, so McCullough explained that many women are thrown into the street by their domestic partners if they don’t agree to have an abortion. Foreign women are particularly vulnerable.
“Women who are …. foreign women who don’t have rights to maternity benefits, for example, lose their housing and lose their job,” said McCullough. “These women will have absolutely nothing. Marie Stopes has nothing to offer them except abortion.”
Veglio-White said that Marie Stopes had “trained counsellors” who could spot coercion and would also, if the woman “doesn’t want to go through with it”, would refer her to “impartial government services that are unbiased.”
“Marie Stopes have no agenda,” she said, and the BBC interviewer couldn’t suppress a laugh.
“They have an agenda in the sense that they facilitate—” he began, but the incensed McCullough interrupted him.
“They make £300-plus on every abortion that happens,” she exclaimed. “They’ve got no agenda? Give me a break!”
McCullough pointed out that women in the UK illegally don’t get government services. Veglio-White countered that the Good Counsel Network doesn’t campaign for them. But the Good Counsel Network isn’t a words-and-no-action kind of group.
“We don’t campaign for them,” McCullough replied. “We house them and feed them, and you know nothing about it except to run them into the clinic.”
She explained to the BBC interviewer that women have told them that if the Good Counsel Network volunteers had been a hundred metres away when they arrived at the clinic, the women would not have seen them and “they wouldn’t have had a choice to keep their baby.”
It seems that now many women will not have that choice: Ealing Council voted unanimously last night to create a buffer zone around the Marie Stopes abortion business.
READ: UK council bans pro-life vigils outside abortion center