Anti-abortion campaigners are considering recruiting a PR agency to
support plans to field up to 200 pro-life candidates at the general
election.
The news comes days after the Family Life Campaign announced it intended
to run pro-life candidates in constituencies where sitting MPs, or
candidates, were not strongly opposed to abortion.
Peter Garrett, research director of Life, which has links with the FLC,
said a PR agency was likely to be appointed if the number of fielded
candidates reached 200. He said the total would be announced next week
at a London press conference.
Garrett said any selected agency would have to be in step with pro-life
thinking.
‘We try to check the ethical standpoints of all those who provide us
with services and we would certainly look at the ethics of the PR
agency,’ he stressed.
Garrett mooted that a possible campaign slogan, aimed at highlighting
the pro-choice tendencies of opponents, could be: ‘Don’t vote for us: do
something for the unborn child.’
The FLC’s plans to field candidates comes a week after Cardinal Thomas
Winning, Catholic Church leader in Scotland, criticised Labour leader
Tony Blair for ‘washing his hands’ of the abortion debate.
Earlier Blair, who is likely to face a pro-life candidate in his own
Sedgefield constituency, had urged that abortion should not be turned
into a party political issue.
