Oy… this thread.

"LITTLE INNOCENTS (A Civil Rights Song)
‘On Sunday he was our foetus
On Monday our son did greet us,
For the rest of his life, may we help him in strife,
And please God, the world won’t defeat us.’

The above verse was written as part of the birth announcement for the arrival of our son Tim. The Cleveland newspaper Evening Gazette refused to print it! – ‘because it made some of the girls in the office feel sick…’ After contacting the editor I was told: ‘This is a family newspaper’!

When David Steele’s 1967 abortion law was passed, it seems that WE, society, turned our backs on the very people that this law was designed to help, namely those women who, through desperation, were forced into risking their lives at the hands of the back-street abortionist. We could have helped those women and their babies but sadly our utilitarian society found it more cost-effective to legalese their desperation. Just ten years later and the snowball is still rolling: Pulse. 19 March 1977. Dr Tom Mayer, a GP:
‘… any patient who is not terminated will subsequently require antenatal care, attention during confinement and postnatal follow-up. All the time taken in these procedures is a factor many times that required for a termination. Therefore, all that is needed in order to create sufficient beds for termination is to convert a few antenatal beds and a delivery theatre at present in use on obstetric units for abortion work.’

I believe that something has gone terribly wrong. What was always a tragic exception is becoming an even more tragic norm.

At the time of writing, my wife Pat is five months pregnant, our third child is jumping about busily in her womb. In theory our child is already protected bylaw; in practice, however, this is not so. A local doctor has already offered Pat an abortion should she ‘need' one.

If Pat and I were forced, by whatever desperation, into even contemplating the terminating of our child's life, then it is our human right to be helped out of that desperation and not ‘helped’ along with it. It is our child’s human right to be protected from the consequences of our desperation!

In common with every other human in this world, my wife and I were once foetuses. We were not inferior humans then, we are not inferior humans now, and our child is inferior to no man. WE DEMAND EQUAL RIGHTS FOR OUR CHILD, whether he/she be ‘normal' or handicapped. We wish to have nothing whatsoever to do with any Master Race ideology. Our child is equal, along with each and every other child that is awaiting silently for the next stage in the ongoing process of life, in what should be the safest place on earth!

First, may I apologise to my many good friends and to all others who have been through the trauma of abortion and may be upset by my views as expressed in some of these notes and in the songs Little Innocents and Lynda. My intention is not to offend but to inform those unaware of what is, to my mind, the grossest excess of our materialistic ‘throw-away' society.

This album is dedicated to the mothers of Britain’s 2,000,000 ‘Desaparecidos’."
[Liner notes, Vin Garbutt, Little Innocents, Topic TSDL428, 1983]