MANCHESTER, U.K. (LifeSiteNews) — An aggressive pro-abortion mob disrupted a pro-life event, shouting profanities and threatening members of a pro-life student group with rape and death.
On February 29, a pro-abortion crowd of roughly 250 people gathered in front of a building at the University of Manchester where a meeting of the Manchester Pro-Life Society was held, shouting insults and threats at pro-lifers and preventing several students from entering the building.
Pregnant woman escorted home by police due to violent pro-abortion activists: ‘I was terrified’
According to a press release from Right to Life UK, pro-abortion protestors also threw eggs at the building and some pro-life students, and a pregnant 22-year-old woman had to be escorted home by the police due to serious safety concerns.
The Alliance of Pro-Life Students reported that at one point, the police locked the doors to the building where the pro-life talk was held and did not let anyone in, preventing some students from attending the event. Despite this, some masked pro-abortion protestors managed to get into the building with speakers and a megaphone, disturbing the event. According to the Alliance of Pro-Life Students the pro-life group had to relocate into different rooms three times with help from police officers.
Video footage of the event shows members of the Manchester Pro-Life Society leaving the building and being swarmed by pro-abortion protestors yelling, “Shame on you,” as some of them shoved the students and the policemen escorting them.
According to the Alliance of Pro-Life Students, the mob also shouted, “Stay in there and die,” “you should be aborted,” and “F*** you” during the protest.
Maise, the 22-year-old pregnant woman who had to be escorted home by police, said that she felt like “we could be in real danger. I felt especially vulnerable, being 7 months pregnant I was terrified they would hurt me and my baby girl.”
“If it wasn’t for the police and security, people would have definitely been physically hurt,” said Jacob, treasurer of Manchester Pro-Life Society.
One day after the incident, a member from Manchester Pro-Life Society who attended the event, Inge Botha, was interviewed by GB News, where she said that one of the protestors told her to “get raped.”
“People were getting physical they were shouting abuse at us, one man even got into my face with his hand and told me to get raped. That’s not pro-woman,” she stated.
Botha said that the university had protected their right to free speech “until last night.” After the incident, the university told the Manchester Pro-Life Society not to hold any events on campus in the near future.
“We are not allowed to do any more events until Easter because of the safety risk and the perpetrators of the violence last night. They’re not getting any repercussions. We’re not getting any safety measures from the university,” she lamented.
The CEO of the Alliance of Pro-Life Students, Madeline Page, described the incident as “the worst case of abuse against pro-life students that I have seen in over a decade of working with similar pro-life groups.”
“The threat to pro-life students continues to grow and it seems that our higher education establishments are either incapable or unwilling to handle it appropriately,” she added.
“I commend this courageous group of students for standing up for life, for the most vulnerable. They will be on the right side of history,” Page concluded.
Continued attempts to shut down pro-life student groups
The group behind the violent pro-abortion protest, Stop Manchester Pro-Life, releases a list of demands on their Instagram account, including the following: “We demand that the University review the placements of medical students with public Pro-Life statements so that they may not be placed in abortion clinics, maternity wards, and sexual health clinics due to conflict of interest.”
Many pro-life student groups established at universities in the U.K. in the past years were met with attempts to shut them down.
Right To Life UK documented multiple cases:
Since 2017, student representative bodies at Aberdeen University, Glasgow University, Nottingham University and Strathclyde University have all tried to prevent student pro-life groups from being affiliated with their university and benefiting from the same privileges available to any other student group. In each of these cases, the students’ unions had to reverse their decision after the groups threatened legal proceedings against them. Students at Birmingham University also had significant difficulty becoming affiliated with the university but eventually won out against significant opposition.
A similar pattern could be observed at German universities, where pro-abortion resistance on university campuses has been more successful than in the U.K., as several pro-life student groups have been effectively shut down in the past few years. Most recently, an organization at the University of Heidelberg supported by ProLife Europe has been denied official recognition by the university for allegedly engaging in “misogynist activities.”
READ: Pro-life student group excluded from German university for so-called ‘misogynist activities’