Pro-life group 'will name abortion staff on Net'

A militant anti-abortion group is planning to bring American-style tactics to Britain by staging street protests and publicising the names of family planning and NHS staff on the internet.

In the biggest campaign of its type to date, the UK Life League will hold demonstrations outside abortion clinics in cities and stage full-time vigils outside the homes of family-planning workers.

The Scottish-based group has set up a "hall of shame" on its website and invited members of the public and NHS staff to send in names of those involved in abortions.

The UK Life League will also create a political party and put up candidates in every seat in the 2003 Scottish Parliament elections, said its leader, Jim Dowson.

The idea of "naming and shaming" health workers involved in abortion on the internet comes from the United States, where a notorious "Nuremberg Files" site lists names of "baby butchers". Eight doctors named on the highly controversialsite were murdered by anti-abortion extremists. The victims' names are now scored through and labelled "fatalities".

Mr Dowson said his group deplored the use of violence or intimidation but saw it as its legitimate right to demonstrate outside clinics or homes of those involved in abortion.

"These are often publicly paid people who are supposed to save lives, not destroy life. Picketing is a long-established and valid form of protest," he said. "We want to be out on the streets talking to women to persuade them that there is another way. We want to emulate the animal rights movement in the 1970 and 1980s, when their tactics helped to stimulate public debate on an issue that few were talking about."

The league, which draws its members from more established anti-abortion groups such as Life and the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, will widen its campaign to cover the whole of Britain, Mr Dowson said. Demonstrations will be staged in Liverpool, Birmingham and London. The group has already set up scores of rogue websites to redirect women away from the websites of the Brook Advisory Service and other family-planning organisations to its own site. It will back its tactics with a poster campaign aimed specifically at working women, with the slogan: "Your career ­ would you kill for it?"

Mr Dowson said: "We don't have anything to do with the Nuremberg Files people. They criticise us because we don't go as far as they do. Anyway, the only people with anything to fear are those who are killing these babies.We are very much a youth group and we don't operate on the old tactics of seeing if you sway the establishment. We make no bones about it, we want to close down these clinics. We will picket and make noisy protest until they do."

The Nuremberg Files site this month added its first British target, Hawys Kilday, the chief executive of the Brook Advisory Centre in Edinburgh, after her details were posted by the UK Life League.

Neil Horsley, the publisher of the Nuremberg Files, has said his group will target more staff involved in abortions in Britain. As a US-based site, it hopes to avoid any British court bans on publishing material likely to incite violence.

The website encourages anti-abortionists to collect "evidence" against medical personnel; judges, police officers and others who uphold laws on family planning; or politicians who support the woman's right to choose. Under pictures of doctors and addresses of clinics, the site says: "You might want to share your point of view with this 'doctor'."