Ann Farmer has been one of Mercator’s most consistent contributors. Here she tells her own story.

* * * * * * *

The stereotypical pro-lifer is a right-wing – or “far right” – privileged white male. Sadly for the stereotype, not all of us conform to it.

Born and brought up on an English council estate in a poor, working-class family, I could write a book about my education by nuns, up to age 11. But who today would publish a memoir entitled “I was schooled by nuns, but it turned out OK”.

In fact, it was more than OK: we received a first-rate education. There were few resources, but singing was free, and by age 10 or 11 we were involved in local competitions singing such musical masterpieces as Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. As well as regular prayers and (Latin!) Mass, we raised pennies for those even less fortunate.

And yet we were very fortunate. Unlike these enlightened times, it was a childhood largely free from adult concerns imposed upon children – those least capable of processing, let alone dealing with them.

My parents came from the East End of London. Dad, whose own father was a serial deserter, spent his childhood shunted between children’s homes (none of them Catholic). His earliest memory was of him and his brothers being separated from their mother and sisters at the workhouse door, under a system of segregation inspired by Malthus’s theory of overpopulation. His little sister died there. Later, he was very nearly sent to Canada on a eugenics-inspired “orphans” scheme.

My mother’s father was a skilled glassblower, but work was seasonal, and there was much unemployment. Mum’s eldest brother died in a coalmining accident on his 14th birthday - his first day at work – but another uncle became a successful writer of comic songs, some of which featured in a film. Uncle Jim bought my grandparents a house in a leafy suburb, but Grandma thought it too “snobby”; they ended up living in a small council flat on our estate, constructed after the War for those bombed out of the East End.

Today, the East End working classes have been replaced by the woking classes; now, the rich are moving leftwards and the poor rightwards.

As a teen I joined the Labour Party, although the 1967 Abortion Act escaped my youthful consciousness; it was not until the late 1970s, nursing my first child, that I saw a TV programme describing abortion.

Clearly, “the right to choose” is meaningless if women do not know what they are choosing. I joined the Labour Life Group, whose president was Lord Longford, and ended up editing their magazine, writing reports and drawing cartoons (including Professor Bust, the population control enthusiast, and “right to die” advocate Hugo Fearst). Most Party members were very nice, but in a mere foretaste of the intolerance of the tolerant, some middle-class abortion supporters tried to silence us, shout us down, exclude and physically obstruct us.

Then came reproductive technology: years of portraying pregnancy as a deadly disease to be zealously defended against and encouraging women to postpone childbearing. Test-tube babies were portrayed as a scientific miracle – and yet abortion and reproductive technology sprang from the same root: eugenics.

So did euthanasia, and with too many old people – the result of years spent curbing the birth rate – assisted dying could be seen as DIY population control. Although campaigners insist it is only for the dying, it would save a great deal of public money by “assisting the deaths” of the not-dying-for-some-time-yet.

Disability is also costly – even more in countries where it is “free”, like the UK. Despite having significant mobility issues and chronic fatigue, it took me ten years to get a diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (plus a few others – I call it “SSS” – Several Syndromes Syndrome). This was on my own initiative, and during the Covid pandemic my NHS rheumatologist cleared me off his list. Disability is included in the wonderful “rainbow of diversity”, but being disabled has taught me that in real life, euthanasia/assisted suicide is the last piece in a jigsaw of deadly disability discrimination beginning before birth.

For decades now Western governments have curbed the birthrate not only by contraception and abortion, but by “getting women into work”. Reproductive technology offers the false hope of starting a family well into middle age; and if such attempts fail, those reaching old age without children to care for them may claim the right to die.

My published works trace the effects of eugenics population control, and it’s a trail I’m still following. We urgently need to protect the weakest: the mentally challenged, the disabled, the elderly, the very poor – and yes, the unborn, who have no voice and are invisible apart from in the ever-growing statistics of pre-birth killings.

I may be looking at the olden days through rose-coloured glasses, and it is true that most mothers looked after their own children instead of being paid to look after somebody else’s. But these stay-at-home mums spent much time outside the home, shopping, socialising, volunteering and occasionally working for wages. They had the luxury of that most scarce of all commodities, time – time to cook, time to make the children’s clothes, and with the gardens producing fruit and vegetables for the table, there was no need to buy all those “time saving” but expensive commodities.

“The housewife” was a formidable political force, and it is perhaps no coincidence that communities were much safer: with male breadwinners busy providing for their families, society was spared the crime and disorder now treated as normal, as well as a worryingly high male suicide rate. We children could walk on our own through the woods, and we never had to lock our door.

Then came the Sexual Revolution, a top-down revolution which swept away old attitudes with contraception and abortion – free but paid for by taxpayers to prevent the births of future taxpayers. Given scare campaigns about overpopulation, doubtless it seemed that sexual licence would lead to a birth bulge; in fact, it led to a birth dearth, disguised by greater longevity.

The Sexual Revolution has been portrayed as one of liberation, but it led to what Chesterton called “the survival of the fiercest”, with the weakest and poorest paying the price of “free love”. As John Donne observed, “No man is an island”, and a horde of individualistic individuals do not make a society.

My father found a father figure in his own father-in-law; later, Dad performed that role for his sons-in-law, who had lost their own fathers. Real love means sacrifice – one generation for the next, the adults for the children – rather than children being sacrificed to adult whims. A civilised society cares for the weakest; but what happens when there are no intact traditional families left to care for the casualties and when every family is dysfunctional? The right-to-choose movement is silent on this.

And with voices now raised against the negative outcomes of the Sexual Revolution, increasing efforts are being made to censor any criticism of abortion. Thanks to the right-to-choose brigade, the mania for buffer zones around abortion centres is preventing pregnant mothers being offered real choice. The Left, with its generous approach to public welfare, has succeeded in making the poor expensive. No wonder governments of all political stripes now try to save money by curbing births.

Popular perceptions of the “olden days” are of “unwanted children” being abused in orphanages, while the lethal abuse of abortion in our own day is ignored. Similarly overlooked is the fundamental fact that adoption disproves eugenics: adopted children can and do thrive, whatever their “heredity”. But adoption has been made difficult, while mass abortion ensures there are far fewer small babies to adopt. Adopting older children, with all the acquired problems inflicted by parental break-ups and years of being “in care”, is a daunting prospect to childless couples, and many children in the care system end up in the criminal justice system.

Right-wing population controllers/eugenicists would have forcibly sterilised people like my grandparents; however – apart from finding someone to do all the work – this would have deprived the world of Uncle Jim’s songs, which did more to raise public spirits than miserable Malthusian musings ever did.