Actor Liam Neeson has lent his voiceover talents to Amnesty International for an advertisement that is both anti-Life, and, some say, anti-Catholic.
The ad seeks to persuade the people of Ireland to repeal their Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which acknowledges “the right to life of the unborn, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother.” Ireland has one of the strongest – if not the strongest – Pro-Life constitution in the world. And although the Right to Life is guaranteed by the Constitution, the Irish Pro-Life movement is so committed to their cause that they hold regular rallies and campaigns to promote life-affirming principles in Ireland.
But the usual suspects (enter: Amnesty International) seek to dismantle the country’s Pro-Life values and recruited internationally-acclaimed Irishman Liam Neeson to do their bidding. Viewed with the sound off, one might guess the ad was a trailer for a Halloween-themed horror movie. A decrepit graveyard with a church in the backdrop, coupled with the most ominous-sounding voice Neeson could muster, join forces to produce a ghoulish depiction of Life without abortion in Ireland. And then – like an infomercial that transforms from black-and-white to technicolor when the sanity-saving gadget makes an appearance on the screen – we see a colorful meadow and the following words, as Neeson urges us to “repeal the eighth”: Abortion is illegal in Ireland even when there’s a risk to health and in cases of rape, incest and severe foetal impairment. Help us change this.
But Ireland is the premiere country proving to the world that the largely unquestioned “exceptions” to abortion – rape, incest, and Life of the mother– are nothing more than a smokescreen designed to introduce abortion on-demand. In fact, Irish Pro-Lifers draw on America’s example of unrestricted abortion as precisely what they want to protect Ireland from imitating.
Thankfully, many Irish people refuse to buy the fear-mongering of Liam Neeson and Amnesty International, as the following parody of Neeson’s ad demonstrates: