IN THE EARLY PART OF THE 19TH CENTURY, INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND WENT PARANOID AND BALLISTIC over the emergence of roving bands of unemployed workingmen who feared the installation of new, automated machinery in the cotton-weaving industries of Nottinghamshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire as a threat to their jobs, livelihoods and honour.

Calling themselves "Luddites" (probably after Ned Ludd, who smashed a spinning jenny in a Leicestershire cotton mill in 1779 to protest his job being thus lost), its followers worked largely in camera under cover of darkness before going on their orgies of destroying what they saw to be the loss of their jobs and honour. (This was years before the welfare state and unemployment benefits, remember.)

After a series of notorious orgies with sledgehammers and iron bars, 17 Luddite ringleaders were sentenced to death on the gallows @ York in 1813, soon after an Act of Parliament made "machine breaking" (as in industrial sabotage) a capital crime; numerous others involved with the Luddites were sentenced to transportation to the Australian penal colonies. (IMHO, the Luddite types thus sentenced were more than likely assigned to the Van Diemen's Land [Tasmania] penal colony, Alcatraz, as it were, in contrast to the main such in New South Wales and Queensland.)

=============

"WHY," YOU MAY ASK, "BRING UP LUDDITERY AS PART OF A DISCUSSION on objections to abortion?"

Good question there, reader.

Come to think of it, Your Correspondent has to wonder if those who object to abortion on socioeconomic grounds (i.e., to "protect and maintain American jobs," perhaps by way of "industrial heritage" arguments) are probably Luddites @ heart.

Put another way, the protection and continued maintenance of a Luddite socioeconomic model and paradigm--itself expected to be based on free-market capitalistic models and "experience" as are themselves expected to be one with the defence of America's "antient and pecuilar soverignty and soverign identity"--requires maintaining a workforce expected to remain deliberately poor, ignorant and easily-influenced, especially on "patriotic" matters.

The only way they know how to "protect" what is essentially a labour-intensive socioeconomic model as is @ the core of Luddite thought? You guessed it--a "complete and final" ban on abortion, contraception, family planning and sex education.

All excused officially in the name of "economic reasons"--the very patsy which Romania's Communist regime under Nicolae Ceauçescu invoked to ban abortions during his tenure from 1966 until his overthrow in 1989.

Only in Ceauçescu's case, the core desire was to "hasten the final onset of Pure Socialism," which, in Marxist/Leninist thought, would be the final perfection of Communism. Never mind where super-secret estimates suggested that such a policy would only create a significant labour surplus some 30 years on, anathema to a political model which saw mass unemployment as a fatal flaw of capitalism and socioeconomic development based upon centralised Five-Year Plans.

And it's not just about banning abortions: Discouraging investment in new plant and industry, essentially expecting existing industries to keep soldering along with largely outdated, inefficent and labour-intensive manufacturing equipment and processes (excusing such as tax-break-protected "industrial heritage" all the while), is also key to such a strategem.

The which, in any case, needs to be challenged because of its potential socioeconomic consequences. (Unless, of course, you can provide a rational argument in defence of these points.)