The left are singularly obsessed with killing unborn babies. It’s astonishing just how fanatically dedicated to abortion in all its forms they really are.
Now, I’ve never been a rabid anti-abortion type in the least. I’ve always had my feet firmly in the ‘safe, legal and rare’ camp. But at the same time, it’s surely impossible for any sane human to read of living aborted children left to die in a metal dish, or activists demanding ‘abortion’ (in reality, infanticide) literally up to the point of birth and not feel their stomach turn.
Yet, this is the monomania of the left. As an American political observer friend commented to me, abortion is literally the only thing fuelling the Democrat party. To prove it, the DNC has mobile vans offering on-the-spot abortions and vasectomies at its national convention.
Does this strike anyone as remotely sane?
The sheer fanaticism of the abortion lobby is something University of Adelaide law professor Joanna Howe is grimly familiar with.
I have been subject to five investigations in two years.
These investigations have been of varying degrees of severity, formality and length. But they have all been motivated by complaints from individuals who disagree with the substance of my research and advocacy critiquing abortion up to birth in Australia.
First, there was the obviously ludicrous attack that, if you oppose abortion, you must be doing so from a religious viewpoint.
One was from a pro-abortion colleague complaining that my research critiquing abortion was religiously motivated and thus bringing down the reputation of the Adelaide Law School. Never mind the fact that I’d never once used religion as the basis for my argument critiquing laws that facilitate abortion up to birth!
Another complaint was from an activist member of the public alleging that my video on the tragic death of Jessica Jane was misleading. Jessica was a baby girl, unexpectedly born alive after an abortion and left to die on a metal kidney dish for 80 minutes in an empty room. Although my boss acknowledged my video was uncomfortable to watch, she confirmed the accuracy of its contents and its consistency with the coronial report.
Very often the same people who challenge meat eaters to wallow in the blood and muck of a slaughterhouse are strangely averse to likewise facing the grim realities of abortion. As if the unborn child simply evaporates from the womb.
Yet another complaint came in via an email from Western Australian Labor MP Peter Foster to the vice-chancellor. Foster’s problem? Apparently I’d been traversing the halls of WA parliament spruiking a research report that purported to be the views of the university.
It’s a pity Foster didn’t bother to read the report’s first footnote, which made it patently clear the views therein were the author’s alone.
But abortion fanatics are nothing if not obsessive.
Just before Christmas another investigation was initiated: this one prompted by an avalanche of complaints by TikTok activists claiming I had misrepresented facts on abortion and that I shamed women who got abortions. I had done no such thing but that investigation hung over my head, like a cloud, all through the summer holidays.
Finally on January 24, less than two hours after I’d received an email clearing me of the fourth investigation, I received another email, from a different department of the university, opening a new investigation into research misconduct. This one alleged plagiarism and misrepresentation of facts, and was prompted by a complaint from a pro-abortion activist with a TikTok account dedicated to attacking me.
The inquisition dragged out for months. Even when Howe was cleared, the university insisted on imposing “corrective actions”:
A mandatory requirement that I complete an anti-bias course within 30 days and ordering me to have a formal discussion with my line manager about my research.
Making things 100 times worse, the university then wrote a letter to the TikTok troll, failing to mention that I had been cleared of any breach of the Australian Code for Responsible Research. Instead, the university threw me under the bus; writing to the toll that corrective actions had been imposed.
Predictably, the TikTok troll released the letter online and a torrent of online abuse ensued. I was accused by all and sundry of being guilty of plagiarism and misrepresentation of facts, and that the university had ordered me to unpublish my research. Of course none of this was true but the university’s own letter had made it seem like it might be.
In the end, after months more and Howe taking the case to the Fair Work Commission, the university caved.
But that’s not the point: the point is that the process is the punishment, and that universities are only too complicit in enabling vexatious lawfare by fanatical activists.
Yet, these are the same people who scream blue murder about ‘academic freedom’ if anyone takes issue with anti-Semitic leftists parroting Hamas propaganda.
I’ll say it yet again, and now I really mean it: bulldoze the universities. They’re beyond redemption. Time to start over again.
