Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Steak for her dogs, but an austere, childless poverty for the cult's rank and file.
1. Personal testimony from ex-LaRouche followers
2. LaRouchian deception and hypocrisy re abortion
3. Documentation from the "LaRouche Planet" website
4. Other cults that coerce women to have abortions (Scientology, therapy cults)
Molly Kronberg--widow of Ken Kronberg--gives the full story. Discusses the devastating effect of LaRouche's abortion-or-else policy on many women in the cult. Describes a "particularly ghastly forced abortion" that involved "one of the most extreme cases of psychological abuse I have ever seen." And the rationale? "We were told that Plato didn't believe in generating children of the body, but children of the mind. Aside from the fact that Socrates had children, this was about as malevolent as you can get--invoking Plato to try to stampede someone into aborting a baby."
LaRouche's ban on children. Comments by "xlcr4life" on Molly Kronberg's "forced abortion" article. "A few years ago, Lyn waltzed through the Leesburg office and declared that he was a grandfather as his son's wife had just given birth....People who were there could not help but see the looks of disgust and pain on the faces of many LC women who had to hear that from Lyn." Article also deals with the problems of parents who defied LaRouche to have kids, only to have their children funneled years later into the hellish LaRouche Youth Movement.
"LaRouche's revolution devours its children." Molly Kronberg describes LaRouche's opposition to his followers becoming parents. "It was okay for his wife Helga to fly her dogs to and fro, and feed them steak...but it was regarded as indolent opulence to waste money and food on a baby." Yet when members of the Labor Committee defied LaRouche and had families anyway, LaRouche simply tried to recruit the kids as a new generation of cult slaves. Mrs. Kronberg says she told her son, when he was growing up, that if anyone tried to recruit him to the LaRouche Youth Movement, he should say "I'm not joining any organization that tried to have me aborted."
Another former Labor Committee woman--Linda Ray--has also spoken out under her real name. From Ray's "Breaking the Silence" (In These Times, 1986): "Pregnant women were usually told to have an abortion, since having a baby would siphon off too much time and money from the organization. For those who already had children, day care was usually assigned on a haphazard basis."
"The little boy who never was," by Michael Scott Winstead. An account of one of the hundreds of cases of forced abortion in the LaRouche cult: "And they pushed her tearfully into the car, and into the clinic, and they signed her consent forms, and they had her child vacuumed out of her."
"The children of the LaRouche cult" (by "Scott"). "It had never occurred to me the great paradox that must forever live in a LaRouchie-parented child's mind: If Lyndon LaRouche had not been in prison, they would never have been born."
Abortion in the cult "was organized to a science." One of the most outspoken ex-members ("xlcr4life") tells about LaRouche's so-called coat hanger brigade that escorted the cult's women to abortion clinics to make sure they didn't back out. Meanwhile, LaRouche organized the "Club of Life" to infiltrate the Right to Life movement and win friends at the Vatican.
If children are born anyway, just recruit them as the next generation of slave labor. Ex-member "eaglebeak" writes: "The children whose births were previously regarded as tantamount to treason...were now the ones he wanted, and their formerly important parents, the original members, the Baby Boomers, had now become the 'useless eaters' and the saboteurs."
LaRouche comes first, the cult comes second, the family doesn't even count. "Eaglebeak" writes: "Lyn's idea...was that we would all sever our emotional ties to Family, and "cathect" to him instead. He would become our father, our polestar, our god..."
Pressure to have abortions in the Swedish branch of LaRouche's movement. A former member who was active in the European wing from the 1980s into the 2000s, recalls (in a March 10, 2009 posting on his new "Why Lyndon LaRouche is a fraud!" blog) that when a woman in the Swedish leadership gave birth in 1986, "the response of Helga Zepp-LaRouche was 'if they feel lonely they should get a dog instead of a child.'" The blogger sums up Helga and Lyn's underlying policy: "To have children is expensive, they would have to be fed and encouraged to develop....The CAUSE, the 24/7 warlike mobilization for the future of mankind is the only thing that matters..."
The ultimate hypocrisy. Here's a 1983 pamphlet of LaRouche's Club of Life (COL). Note highlighted passages that show how the LaRouchians tried to pose as part of the Right to Life movement. The "Founding Principles" section states that "human life must be defended from the time of conception..." The "highlights" section includes a description of a Jan. 2003 COL conference held in Madrid, supposedly with the participation of Right to Life activists; this was at the same time the LaRouchians were lobbying the Spanish security forces to set up the anti-Basque death squads out of which "Operation Mengele" would emerge (read here).
And look who was in charge of LaRouche's so-called right to life group. This pamphlet (which again affirms that life must be defended from the "time of conception") shows that the Club of Life's U.S. chairperson was none other than Nancy Spannaus, who has been identified by Molly Kronberg and others as playing a key role in enforcing the "abortion or else" policy in the LaRouche cult. Furthermore, the pamphlet lists Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Ms. Spannaus's role model--see Kronberg article above) as the COL's founder.
Note especially Spannaus's wacko article in which she accuses the average citizens of the developed world (brainwashed of course by a cabal of international bankers) of being willing to "pull the plug" on their own grandmothers. At the time this was published, the LaRouche organization had already begun a huge fundraising campaign that would result in their stealing the life savings of grandmothers all over the United States.
Spannaus also complains about the public's alleged acquiescence in "euthanasia, suicide, and withdrawal of medical treatment from 'marginal' people." Yet in more recent years it has been LaRouche, with the help of his wife and Ms. Spannaus, who has withheld decent medical care from his own aging followers, whom he now regards as worthless burnouts. And it was LaRouche who suggested in 2007 that these boomers--especially Ken Kronberg--might as well commit suicide.
More double-talk on abortion from LaRouche's so-called Club of Life. Pro-life report to COL conference in Wiesbaden, Germany (2001) by LaRouche follower who seems oblivious to the fact that the cult had coerced its own members into having hundreds of abortions over the previous quarter century. At the time of this report, most of LaRouche's Boomers were past the child-bearing age, but the cult was already pressuring newly-recruited LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) members to undergo abortions.
In effect, the European Boomers who participated in the COL conference were helping to create a deceptive cover that would facilitate the cult's ongoing practice of forced abortion, with lasting emotional trauma for LYM women. [Commentary by Dennis King blames Janet Reno, Clinton's attorney general, for allowing LaRouche's early release from prison, which enabled him to crack down on the trend that had developed among his followers during his incarceration, of families giving birth to or adopting children--a trend that might have led to the cult's dissolution if the DOJ had kept LaRouche where he belonged.]
How LaRouche's "Club of Life" suckered a distinguished Colombian journalist.
The Feb. 22, 1983 issue of LaRouche's EIR included a translation of an article that had appeared earlier that month in leading Colombian newspapers. The byline given was that of "Jaime
Sanin Cheverri" (journalist, academic and man of letters Jaime
Sanín Echeverri, 1922-2008). Sanín hails Lyndon and Helga LaRouche and their Club of Life for fighting against the population-control-oriented Club of Rome. He alleges that the Club of Rome, with its "incomparable financial power," has "spread propaganda for and practiced contraception, sterilization of females and males, abortion, and ultimately, the most sinister plans to assassinate the elderly and the handicapped." He contrasts this supposedly evil organization with the "men and women of the Club of Life [who] offer a promising future for all mankind."
Doubtless Sanín was unaware of the LaRouche organization's hypocritical practice of enforced abortion within its own ranks and its predatory financial practices targeting the elderly (much less its exploitation of the handicapped). EIR's introduction to the article describes Sanín as a "close friend of President
Belisario Betancur" (Belisario Betancur Cuartas, b. 1923, was Colombia's president from 1982-86). If the two were in fact close, Betancur appears not to have been influenced by Sanín's enthusiasm for LaRouche. Betancur is currently (as of 2009) the vice-president of the Club of Rome for Latin America. As to the Club of Life, it no longer exists. LaRouche purged the Catholics and other Christians from his organization and moved on to "fresh scams and con games new."
"The ugly truth about LaRouche's policy of enforced abortion." Compendium of statements, as from ex-LaRouche follower "eaglebeak" who writes that "virtually every woman in the Labor Committee from the early 1970s through the 1990s--every woman who was fertile, that is--had at least one abortion." [If this statement is accurate, and if many of these women had multiple abortions at LaRouche's command, we are talking about close to a thousand abortions, and possibly more.--DK]
She headed up LaRouche's "coat-hanger brigade." Information about Nancy Bradeen Spannaus, LaRouche's ultra-hypocritical aide who was also a leader of his "Club of Life." File includes 1994 article from LaRouche's New Federalist newspaper that expresses support for anti-abortion activists, and an article reporting on Spannaus's Virginia campaign for the U.S. Senate that year ("Spannaus Fights Culture of Death, Says 'Never Again'!").
LaRouche on "abortion and natural law." In this July 3, 1992 morning briefing, apparently dictated by telephone from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons' Federal Medical Center in Rochester, MN, LaRouche informs us that "historically, abortion was practiced chiefly by witches, and they pushed abortion as a matter of policy...as a matter of Satanic attack on civilization." And he claims that in the twentieth century the mantle has passed to the feminists, whose advocacy of abortion is "literally Satanic." Hmmm...if certain women in the LaRouche organization function as a coat-hanger brigade, and if abortion is a "matter of policy" in the LaRouche org, and if abortion-by-policy is Satanic, and if LaRouche commands his witch-aides such as Spannaus to enforce such a policy--who (or what) does that make LaRouche?
LaRouche ducks and weaves on the abortion issue (2003). In addressing a LaRouche Youth Movement cadre school, Der Abscheulicher answers a question about his views on abortion by merely saying "I believe in human beings, essentially." Claims that "the question of abortion has become a fraudulent question" (meaning that he doesn't want to give a public answer that might come back to bite him). Says, however, that the Right to Lifers are "a bunch of bums" and summarizes their viewpoint as: "Don't kill the fetus; wait till it's born and then kill it." Never alludes to the abortions that his own LYM is imposing on the young women in its ranks. Goes on and on, however, about his supposed crusade against euthanasia of the elderly (this from a convicted felon who spent five years in federal prison for scamming infirm senior citizens out of their life savings).
Ex-Scientologists discuss the cult's policy and practice re abortions and childcare. Postings on the Operation Clambake message board, including items reposted from other ex-Scientology online discussions. Many of the items below were taken from the Operation Clambake site, where you can read them in context and also find many shorter anecdotes and memories.
Affidavit of Mary Tabayoyon re abortions in Scientology. Filed in U.S. District Court, Central District of California (1994). Ms. Tabayoyon was a member of Scientology's Sea Org, a tightly disciplined inner cadre of the church. She states that Sea Org women "were forbidden to have any more children if they were to stay on post and the Hubbard technology was applied to coercively persuade us to have abortions....[We were told] that we had the responsibility on our shoulders for the expansion of Scientology and freeing mankind....We, at this high level, could not afford the time and resources it would take to raise children. Having children was found to undermine our production and our purpose." Also describes the harsh punishments dished out to Sea Org women afterwards for having become pregnant in the first place. Says that many, many abortions were performed at a single Planned Parenthood clinic.
The future that could have been... "Still Not Free" tells about her own two forced abortions "pushed by the execs of the org and my husband" (the latter also a Scientologist). Describes how she was assigned to convince another Sea Org woman to have an abortion. When she found out the pregnant woman had taken her advice, Still Not Free recalls walking around "in a daze--I felt so guilty and responsible. To this day I think about the future that could have been. The joy that could have been and the little innocent, whose life was sacrificed yet again--for the good of the Sea Org." Warning: This posting has an extremely gruesome description of a late-term abortion allegedly performed illegally by a Scientology physician.
Forced abortion among L. Ron Hubbard's teenage "messengers." Stacy Brooks Young tells about the "messengers" who "waited on LRH [L. Ron Hubbard] hand and foot when
he was on [his] ship, the Apollo. Some of these young girls had as many as six
and eight abortions--in fact, the messengers required so many abortions that
it was part of the routine whenever they docked in a port for all the girls to
go to the local hospital and stay in a ward together for their abortions."
Young also describes what happened if Sea Org members already had children when they joined the elite outfit, or if a child was born to a Sea Org member in spite of the leadership's pressure:
"It was a huge flap when all of the Scientology children showed up at their public school with lice. This
happened frequently. It was a flap when there was a health inspection and the
children's quarters were so filthy that an "all-hands" had to be called to clean
up the filth before the inspectors arrived. It was a flap when a Cadet Org staff
member was caught forcing sex on the children. This happened several times that
I can remember. It was a flap when parents wrote reports complaining that their
children--including babies--were being left totally alone all day long and
into the night because there were no personnel to take care of them." And if the woman refuses to have an abortion, what happens? Statement by "wuzdead," a 12-year Scientology veteran: "While I was in the Sea Org and
became
pregnant with my first child...I was strongly encouraged to get an abortion and told that 'there
were already too many bodies on this planet.'" She writes that she had the child anyway and then found that the cult still wanted her and her husband's total commitment, yet was unable to provide even the most minimally acceptable childcare facilities.
"It still eats me alive how
I
allowed my son from age 0-4 to live in the cadet org in such stinking
dirty
conditions. At all times during those 4 years, it seemed...that over
50% of
the children were on antibiotics. While there, my son almost lost his
sight
when a 'nanny' left a pail of cleaning solution unsecure and it dumped
over
on his face. I was called 12 hours later and met them at the hospital
where
it was touch and go with the poor little guy's eyes propped open with
clamps,
screaming in terror, while they were rinsed out....
"[And then, when] I was on the RPF and routing out of the
Sea
org, I was not allowed to seem my son for months. He was 4 at the
time and I
remember one instance when we RPFers were digging a ditch outside
the
nursery, my son was on the other side of the fence, recognized me and
came
running shouting 'mommy, mommy, mommy!' I just wanted to go
and grab him and
hug him; I hadn't seen him for months at this stage. I started crying
and
the S.O. member in charge of us coldly shouted at me to keep
digging!!" Sea Org women went for abortions at Planned Parenthood, then were punished afterwards. By Ida Camburn: "A friend of mine...told me that she used to transport the
pregnant
women at the [Sea Org] base to Riverside, California for their abortions.
For
about a year, she transported women almost weekly to the
Planned
Parenthood Center, in Riverside....When they returned to the base they went to Ethics." (And you really, really don't want to be sent to Ethics.)
Sea Org directive (June 29, 1979) re "Pregnancies and Babies." Whoever wrote this directive emphasized their main point in Hubbardesque capital letters: "FROM NOW UNTIL THERE ARE ADEQUATE FACILITIES AND
PERSONNEL FOR THE
CCO AND THAT ORG IS SET UP TO HANDLE BOTH EXISTING SEA
ORG CHILDREN
AND FUTURE EXPANSION, THERE ARE TO BE NO MORE BABIES
OR PREGNANCIES
IN PAC." The cold utilitarian attitude towards babies was further highlighted in the next paragraph:
"Any couple violating this rule will be subject to immediate
Fitness Board to determine whether they are sufficiently a facility
differential to their org and the Sea Org to warrant the expense,
manpower and space required to care for their child. If the
Fitness
Board finds that they are not, they will be routed out." The directive tried to blame this policy on temporary lack of child-care resources. But Scientology was and is the wealthiest cult in the world--it could easily have accommodated chidren, as most religious groups (including the majority of cultic ones) somehow manage to do. In fact, the resources for expanded Sea Org child care were not forthcoming, and the practice of coerced abortion inside Scientology's quasi-military core appears to have continued for at last 20 years.
No blankets for infants! Statement by Ann Marie Woodward, a 17-year veteran of the Sea Org. Ms. Woodward says that she knew of "many abortions." Also says she witnessed extreme neglect of Sea Org babies when she was assigned to clean the nursery: "The conditions there were appalling! There were babies in a
room where the youngest ones were that were not being
supervised. They were all between about 6 months and a year
and a half. There were about 12 of them. They were all in cribs
with no blankets (if I remember correctly) and were dirty and
there was no adult in the room! They were not playing together
or learning as babies and toddlers should be." (Scientology of course tried to use these appalling conditions to justify the forced abortion policy--but in fact the church could have (a) given the Sea Org members time to spend with their children and (b) invested a tiny fraction of the church's vast wealth to hire professional child care staff and upgrade nursery and pre-school facilities.)
Lies and hypocrisy! Ex-Scientologist "Ladybird" writes: "Abortions in the Sea Org started on the Apollo [Hubbard's ship], and continue to this day.
Sea Org women are forced and coerced to abort their children.
The Church of Scientology is supposedly against a woman's right to
have an abortion. The Church has officially condemned women
who have abortions, and physicians who perform abortions, as
'murderers.' This is a shore story, and they are lying." Ladybird then provides a number of quotes from Hubbard's writings that show the contrast between the church's official pronouncements and the reality. This hypocrisy is similar to that of Scientology's erstwhile ally Lyndon LaRouche, who would send the women in his group to infiltrate the Right to Life movement one week, and send them to the abortionist the next.
Did Hubbard practice what he DIDN'T preach? "Ladybird" quotes a passage from Dianetics in which Hubbard describes and condemns a gruesome attempted abortion. "One would think," she Ladybird remarks, "that Hubbard was a man who was opposed to
abortion,
until evidence surfaced that showed Hubbard was writing from
his
PERSONAL experiences performing abortions on his own wife." She quotes from a published interview with Hubbard's son, L. Ron Jr.: "It was around 1939, 1940, that I watched
my father
doing something to my mother. She was lying on the bed and he
was
sitting on her, facing her feet. He had a coat hanger in his hand.
There
was blood all over the place. I remember my father shouting at
me. 'Go
back to bed!' A little while later a doctor came and took her off
to the
hospital. She didn't talk about it for quite a number of years."
"Scientology ordered my daughter to have an abortion; she refused--and then the bullying began." Statement by Clarence Sevdy (1998), who recounts his daughter's story of alleged heavy psychological pressure, including being screamed at during three days of e-meter sessions. Her father says Scientology promised her a bus ticket home but then took her to another location and subjected her to a day-long "verbal beating." Says they asked her to sign a document; when she refused, "they sent her out onto the street." She returned to her parents and had the baby. Mr. Sevdy remarks: "I love my 7 year old granddaughter, and get mad as hell at the bastards that almost killed her."
Excerpts from affidavits and other court documents re pregnancy and abortion in the Sea Org. For instance, this affidavit from Jesse Prince, July 27, 1998: "My wife Monica became pregnant and and although we were elated, she was ordered to abort the child. The reason for the abortion order is
that Sea Org members
were not allowed to have
children. The order
devastated both my wife
and me. Our dedication as
Sea Org members clashed
violently with our
intentions as parents and
we went through a
personal nightmare with
me opposing it, to no avail.
She got the abortion and
afterwards she was not the
same. She was devastated
at the impact of what she
did and that was when she
told me she wanted to
leave."
The Planned Parenthood clinic finally became suspicious. Transcript of "The Dark Side of Scientology," a 1997 German TV documentary. A former Sea Org member was interviewed: "I was induced to have an abortion. Women who get pregnant are driven to
a clinic in Riverside to get abortions as a matter of course." The director of the clinic (Planned Parenthood in Riverside, CA) was also interviewed: "We thought that it was really very peculiar that all the
women were making the same decision. Independent of the individual woman's
condition, all of them had made the decision to have an abortion. It made
no difference how old they were or how many children they had already had.
We thought that was very strange. And as we took the trouble to look into
individual cases more precisely, because the whole thing was beginning to
look suspicious, they stopped coming to us altogether."
Abortions in Fred Newman's International Workers Party aka "Social Therapy." Declaration of William Pleasant, a former IWP member: "Women who were urged to abort were often accompanied by 'supportive comrades'--usually social therapists or thoroughly committed social therapy patients." Pleasant says that only one woman, to his knowledge, ever had a child while in the cult, and she was a successful career woman who supposedly "had bucks to essentially buy her birthing rights from Newman." (Women who already had children when they joined, essentially turned their kids over to Newman to be raised as his acolytes.)
"When Therapists Drive Their Patients Crazy.". Article by Carol Lynn Mithers from California magazine, August 1988. Describes how the Center for Feeling Therapy coerced women into having abortions, sex with their therapists, etc. "Women who already had children had been told to surrender custody because they were too 'crazy' to care for them; those who became pregnant were informed kids were 'a suck' and were pressured to have abortions. And patient after patient recounted instances of sex with therapists, of being hit, kicked, punched, ordered to strip, called 'dead,' 'insane,' of being told how often to have sex and with whom..."
And remember Synanon? From the New York Times obituary (March 4, 1997) of the drug rehab cult's founder, Charles Dederich: "Accounts of violence and the insistence by Mr. Dederich on forced vasectomies for men
in Synanon, mandatory abortions for women and the divorce of more than 230 of its
married couples who were to switch to other partners led to investigations and
unfavorable newspaper publicity.
In 1980, Mr. Dederich pleaded no contest to charges that he and two members of
Synanon's security force had conspired to commit murder..."
The ethic of "radical obedience" puts children last. Article by Doni Whitsett and Stephen A. Kent published in Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Services. Describes the replacement of family love and responsibility by a surrogate cult-family with a collectivist ethic of "radical obedience." Traces the horrific effects: forced abortion, separation of children from their parents, physical and sexual abuse of children, lack of medical care for both parents and children, near-starvation diets, cult-instigated separations and divorces of parents. Notes how some cult leaders "attempt to prevent women from getting pregnant or pressure them to terminate their pregnancies." Cites the examples of Synanon and the Center for Feeling Therapy (coerced abortions) and the Rajneesh cult (coerced male and female sterilization).
LAROUCHIAN DECEPTION AND HYPOCRISY RE ABORTION
Nancy Bradeen Spannaus, LaRouche's chief abortion enforcer, is shown here running for the U.S. Senate as a "conservative" Democrat. She also served as a spokesperson for the "Club of Life."DOCUMENTATION FROM THE "LAROUCHE PLANET" WEBSITE
OTHER CULTS THAT COERCE WOMEN TO HAVE ABORTIONS
Scientology
L. Ron Hubbard's good ship "Apollo": When it was in port, the Sea Org slaves were marched to the abortion clinic.Therapy cults
Fred Newman, anti-family Marxist ideologue who pressures his followers to have abortions, has received tens of millions of dollars from wealthy liberals for the "All Stars Project," a charity where his childless followers can play ideological "parents" to other people's kids, and indoctrinate them re Newman's "friendosexual" lifestyle (read here).OVERVIEW: HOW CULTS WAGE WAR ON THE FAMILY
MORE TO COME
