“Get your rosaries off our ovaries” chanted a group of men protesting the first meeting of the Manchester Pro-Life Society, a student group established at Manchester University in January 2024 to “create a pro-life culture on campus”.
“Get your rosaries off our testicles” would have been more accurate, but it just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Besides, the group of protesters heckling the pro-life students didn’t appear overly concerned with matters of truth, rather with creating a terrifying and hostile spectacle – one in which Inge Botha, a first year undergraduate dental hygiene and therapy student and member of the society, found herself immersed in as she tried to attend the meeting.
“It just didn’t make any sense,” Botha tells the Catholic Herald. “I was expecting a bit more of an intellectual approach to disagreements over the viewpoints of other students, simply because it is supposed to be an institution of learning and debate.”
“They’re debating it in [the UK] parliament, so why can’t we, at university, be a little microcosm of what the country is doing,” she says. “The whole idea of university is research based, especially at Manchester, [which] is a very research-led university. It is enquiry that leads this research. How is it suddenly different when it is about being pro-choice and pro-life?”
She adds: “I was expecting more [of that sort of enquiry], and definitely was not expecting the violence we experienced at our first meeting.”
A crowd of approximately 250 – 300 people surrounded the building where Botha and about 30 other students were meeting. The mob became aggressive and had to be held back by Police as members of the pro-life society entered and exited the building.
“We had just met and knew that there was going to be a protest in a separate building, but somehow they found out where we were and they came and hurled insults at us, as well as eggs. They were being very hateful towards us and our religion, which is predominantly Catholic.
“But the worst part of the evening was exiting the building afterwards, because there was a wall of people screaming at us. It was so loud that it made your ears ring. The protestors got right up in our faces with their hands, and faces, screaming insults and making terrible threats.
“I was told to ‘get raped’ by a man in the crowd. They became violent towards the police, breaking through the barrier that had been formed to protect us and one among us was pregnant and feared for the safety of her unborn child; she had to be escorted home by the police.”
Saint Mother Theresa, who worked tirelessly to defend life from conception to natural death, said: “Any country that accepts abortion, is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what it wants.” I put that prophetic statement to Botha and asked her what she made of it after what happened at her university.
“That’s exactly what we saw” Botha says. “They seemed unable to see the incoherence of their own position. Accusing us of being anti-women and then threatening to rape us. Weaponising sexual assault to try and push their own ideologies. They were a crowd driven by feeling and not reason, and that feeling was so intense it caused them to act violently.”
I asked Botha what she thought the protestors might notice if they were able to step back, take a breath and see things more clearly.
“They would notice that we are creeping closer to laws that further threaten the fundamental right to life. Bills being proposed that would remove any restrictions on abortion right up to birth, as well as those seeking to legalise assisted suicide, and that our aim is simply to defend the lives of those who will be marginalised by such changes.
“We just want to have a peaceful society where we can explore issues that threaten the dignity of all human life from conception to natural death and consider how we might offer support to those affected by all kinds of things that undermine human dignity: poor living standards, neglect, or women in desperate need facing the prospect of a surprise unwanted pregnancy alone.”
As the conversation drew to an end, I asked Botha if she had anything further that she would like to add.
“I just want to give a shout out to Manchester Pro-Life [Society],” she said, “especially the male members of the group who have faced a lot of criticism for being part of it.”
It seemed a fitting way to end the conversation. There is an idea that one of the ways in which God dispenses punishment in the Old Testament is to give the people what they want.
This beautiful, intelligent, compassionate young woman was able to recognise that we women will get the men we ask for. It could be a punishment or a reward, depending on which side of the barricade we stand.
As a mother of three girls, I hope and pray that my daughters will, one day, bring home a man who recognises her true value and upholds her dignity – a real man who is brave enough to defend her and who does not act like a pusillanimous wimp, both in the room and outside it, simply trying to uphold his perceived right to use and discard her.
But these young people need help. They need something more substantial than an education system captured by the shallow sloganeering of Equity, Inclusivity and Diversity.
As Catholic Herald commentator Gavin Ashenden highlights, the chaotic scenes at the university and vitriol expressed by the protesters make it “hard not to ask the question: What on earth possessed them?” It’s enough, he goes on to suggest, to make one consider whether the dark gods of old are indeed back.
In the days following the protest at the university, France – once a bastion of Catholicism in Europe – chose to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right, thereby becoming the only country in the world to use its most fundamental principles of law to guarantee the right to terminate a pregnancy up to 14 weeks.
“Only by instilling a high moral vision can a society ensure that its young people are given the possibility to mature as free and intelligent human beings, endowed with a robust sense of responsibility to the common good, capable of working with others to create a community and a nation with a strong moral fibre,” Pope Saint John Paull II remarked during World Youth Day in 1993.
“If you want equal justice for all, and true freedom and lasting peace, then defend life! All the great causes that are yours today will have meaning only to the extent that you guarantee the right to life and protect the human person.”
Photo: Split-screen image showing screenshots of images of the protest taken from www.righttolife.org.uk, and of Inge Botha taken from GB News video.
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