Mr William Spring. 29, an independent publisher and managing director of the "Oxford Review." a weekly magazine, has launched a 20page monthly "Humanity" as an organ for the Pro-Life Movement.
Collaborating with him are Mr Nicholas Fogg, an Anglican, who works for a national charity, and Mrs Denyse Handler of Toronto.
Explaining the magazine was essentially satirical in nature Mr Spring said: "Our object is to serve as some sort of literary focus for resistance to the errors of the now prevailing humanist orthodoxy. We are particularly concerned with questions such as pornography, the growing threat to democracy and free speech, euthanasia and the increasing trend to regard killing as an acceptable solution for social problems.
"But our particular and immediate concern at present is to secure repeal of the•1967 Abor
tion Act and in the editorial for our second issue we make clear our determination, to quote Hugh Gaitskell, "to fight and fight and fight again, to save innocent life," The controversial character of the magazine was expressed in the first issue with an attack on Martin Cole and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. Set in the year 2001 the article offers a fascinating glimpse into the future with Britain seen as a rapidly depopulating island contracting under the twin pressures of mandatory abortion and involuntary euthanasia.
The article portrays an Oxford where academic debate continues in "Casanova College" (built on the site of the old "All Souls" demolished under the "Secularisation of Christian Titles Act"). It is there that the Oxford University Faculty of Sex was centred, which had been presided over for many years by Martin Cole. Cole had arrived in Oxford, after quitting a comfortable chair in the Sexual Sciences at Birmingham, in order to occupy the even more exceedingly luxurious "mattress" offered to him by the Oxford Faculty. From where he had held forth influencing a whole generation of Oxford undergraduates . .
The second edition of "Humanity" is no less controversial including among other things a one-act play for today, "Adventures of Boris." featuring abortion baron Boris in confrontation with an ageing liberal politician "Dave the Whip" an encounter in which the Whip comes off decidedly worst.
There is also an attack upon the conservationist movement with the accusation that they had been "bought off" by the abortionists. "Whereas the conservationist seems so anxious to conserve paper and material resources and vegetables and even animal life, human life, the only life expressly mentioned in the Scriptures as being made in the image of God they are quite prepared to see perish ... in all the contemporary equivalents for our enlightened age of the death camps of Nazi Germany. Our Calthorpes, our "pregnancy advisory services" . . . our Langham Streets, our charnel houses, institutions of death, different in degree but not in kind from other strange sounding and frightening names such as Treblinka . . ." '
Mr Spring, who is a pentecostal and a member of the "Assemblies of God," a denomination which believes in healing and miracles, states that "Humanity" is representative of a new type of magazine. "We
arc not interested in occupying the middle ground of consensus politics. The issues of good and evil confronting our society today are such that no neutrality is permissible.
"We are frankly a propagandist magazine, and possibly this might reflect the increasing polarisation of opinion within the country regarding moral issues. That we have received such support as we have indicates that it is these questions, not economics, which preeminently concern people. It's a pity our politicians don't recognise this."
Mr Malcolm Muggeridge is acting as an unofficial adviser to the paper. "It's good to have an old journalistic pro like Malcolm around to give us encouragement," remarked Mr Spring;