In the sea of numerous news and affairs, the Serbian public almost missed the news that the International Summit "For Life" is being held in Belgrade from May 11 to 14. The only media that has paid attention to this topic so far is Television N1. As the summit has yet to be held, it is difficult to get more details, especially when you are "decorated" with the label of a free-thinking media.
What is the International Summit "For Life"? From the name, it can be concluded that it is something about clean air, healthy food, pollution... Well, it is not. It's an anti-abortion summit. And no, we don't have any American evangelical preachers coming to give us wisdom, we have our own domestic ones. Some of the names from the organizing committee of this summit are: Željko Marjanov, Aleksandra Mitić Paunović, Kosta Stjepanović... What kind of meeting it is, can best be illustrated through the biography of one of the organizers, Marija Stajić, who is also the only person with an email address that is not on the ji-mail service, it already has the extension of the organization (Prolife Worldwide). She is a translator employed by the National Bank of Serbia who writes for Orthodox magazines and publications in her spare time. Also, her official biography states that she is the first licensed educator in Serbia for the FEMM fertility monitoring method. FEMM is not a method, but an application for monitoring the menstrual cycle, with advice on what to eat and how to breathe, but... Back in 2019, the British "Guardian" discovered that this application is funded by organizations that support the ban on abortion. With the collection of personal data about the woman, her cycle, the calendar of intimate relationships, they subtly raise doubts about the effectiveness of contraceptive pills. That's just one example of what this app does in the background.
But let's go back to the summit. This is the first International Summit "For Life", and the plan is to hold it in a different country every year, if there are organizations in the Pro-life Worldwide network. And here we come to the interesting part: there are countless organizations, but the vast majority are from different states of the USA. Other countries where the organizations are from are: Poland (abortion illegal), Portugal (abortion legal since 2007, under strict conditions), Republic of Ireland (abortion legal since 2018) and Northern Ireland (abortion legal since 2020, but, according to the "Guardian" , is still difficult and rarely implemented). And of course, there are Serbia, BiH and Montenegro.
Therefore, the organizations that are part of the "Za život" network come from countries that have a long and bad tradition of banning or restricting the right to abortion and three countries of the former Yugoslavia, which inherit the legal right to abortion, and since the constitutional changes in SFRY in 1974 and the Constitution guaranteed right to abortion. Our tradition is not conservative and "pro-life", but we can say that we were part of one of the countries that were among the first in the world to declare the right to abortion a constitutional right.
It is expected that at the gathering in Belgrade pro-lifers will tell us what is written in the Bible. Maybe it's not a bad time to tell them: the Bible can be interpreted in many ways, and the Constitution of Serbia can only be interpreted in one way. Article 63 of the Constitution of Serbia is short and clear: Everyone has the right to freely decide on the birth of children.
And period.
The organization "Savez za život", one of the organizers of the summit, on its website, just in the announcement of this event, presents absolutely false information about the fact that half of pregnancies in Serbia are intentionally terminated. According to the data of the "Milan Jovanović Batut" Institute (the most recent for 2019), 13.901 intentional terminations of pregnancy were performed in Serbia, while 62.372 births were registered.
Of course, pro-lifers like to inflate the number of abortions, so their "estimates" range from 40.000 to 250.000. In addition, they lie that private clinics do not report terminations of pregnancy. Then let's do some math: in private clinics, this intervention costs around 300 euros. If 250.000 abortions are performed in Serbia per year, that is 75 million euros. Only from abortions... If that were the case, Serbian gynecologists would be millionaires, and we know that they are not. So, proven lie, let's move on…
The "For Life" international summit will be held in the same week as the "Family Days" event in Belgrade. Those "Family Days" were thought up at a joint meeting in February of this year by Patriarch Porfirije and Mayor of Belgrade Aleksandar Šapić. A family bike ride around New Belgrade has already been announced for May 7th, and then a series of events that are not necessarily connected to this White World summit await us. However, it is interesting that both events were announced in February and are taking place in the same week of May. It is even more interesting to connect all of this with the patriarch's Easter epistle, which uses gender-sensitive language as the greatest enemy of marriage and family.
Are we paranoid if we think that someone negotiated with the Serbian Orthodox Church to keep quiet about the negotiations with Kosovo, but to pour freely on women? Did they barter us for Kosovo? We'll find out in a week or two.
