Melancholicus has noted a glut of anniversaries lately, including the 40th anniversary of the execution of Ernesto Guevara and the 45th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council.
The image reproduced here is of a poster created by a group called Choice Ireland; their impious presence on the web can be viewed here. Their website is replete with links to Indymedia, which is a hard-line international socialist news outlet. That socialists and feminists would make common cause in such an issue as abortion need not surprise us; socialists have always been noted more for taking lives than saving them.
Choice Ireland is now busy organising a celebration of another anniversary, namely that of the legalisation of abortion in Britain in 1967. These posters have appeared everywhere throughout the humanities building in the university where Melancholicus earns his crust, so he decided to appropriate one of them for the benefit of his readers.
Melancholicus quite appreciates this poster, for he feels in its simple imagery it makes a point more eloquently against the abortionists themselves than any words of his could do.
The most prominent image on the poster is Venus’ mirror, the universally-recognised symbol of femaleness and femininity — but what is that object within the circle? To Melancholicus’ eye, it looks remarkably like a clenched fist. Already we have to do with violence. So abortion is about compassion, is it? Could have fooled me.
This poster celebrates 40 years of the killing of the unborn in Britain. Yes, that’s right: celebrates. We might also note, with a not displeasing sense of irony, the colour of the digits making up the number 40 on either side of the mirror’s handle.
Of what, in the context of ‘reproductive rights’, does the colour red remind you, gentle reader?
Yes, this is the actual colour that appears in the original: Melancholicus has not doctored his image of this poster to make the abortionists look worse than they are, but has displayed it as its designers intended it to be seen.
How ironically fitting.
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