Right to Life attacks health charities – and its own allies?
Via Nikki on Twitter, the Red Queen on GayNZ reports that Right to Foetal Global Domination Life NZ are attacking Family Planning and Women’s Health Action’s status as charitable organisations.
If Right to Life wants to ‘go nuclear’ against Womens Health Action and Family Planning and attack and endanger access to womens and reproductive health over WHAT and FPA’s involvement in pro-choice decriminalisation of abortion concerns, then I suggest someone on the side of progressive social reform should retaliate in kind and draft a complaint to the Charities Commission about the activities of the aforementioned groups in the context of their opposition to marriage equality.
I like the idea, but from a quick reading of the Charities Commission website, I don’t think either effort would have a real chance of success:
Activities that are unlikely to affect charitable status
Undertaking the following activities is unlikely to adversely affect an entity’s charitable status:
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supporting or opposing legislation directly related to the entity’s charitable purpose
For the goodies, I think it’s pretty obviously good news: abortion and reproductive healthcare are pretty much the definition of “directly related to the … charitable purpose”.
For the villains, it’s probably also good news: because organisations like Family First have completely distorted the true meaning of “family” and “social welfare” and “promoting community” to cover everything from street-based sex work to gambling locations to bail laws and the drinking age, all their obvious political activity seems related to their “charitable purpose” as outlined in the Charity Rules posted on their page on the Commission’s website.
The thing is, I don’t really believe that Ken Orr is this stupid. He probably knows full well that this strike against organisations which actually give a toss about real, born, living breathing thinking human beings is doomed to fail.
But it’s like a trope from every plucky-class-action-lawsuit movie ever: the forces of evil just try to drown the heroes in paperwork. It doesn’t matter that Right to Control Your Uterus Life won’t succeed in getting WHA and FPA deregistered, because the goal is to take resources away from promoting health and providing education and potentially saving lives. The goal is to stop even one person from accessing healthcare information which might involve them gaining some control over their own reproduction.
If one unplanned pregnancy results from this charade, Ken Orr thinks it’s a victory. If that pregnant person then cannot access safe early abortion because of the hard work he’s put in to making it incredibly difficult to do so, Ken Orr gives himself a gold star. If that pregnant person or their baby dies because of insufficient education or pre-natal care, Ken Orr doesn’t give a fuck, because he’s all about life oppressing people with uteri and limiting their healthcare options.
The only pity of the matter is that Right to Patriarchy Life isn’t itself a charitable organisation. Because then it might just be worth spending my own time to waste some of Ken’s in exactly this way.
Ideologically Impure 
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