Nancy Spannaus and the policy of mandatory-abortions

Dennis King wrote about Nancy Spannaus:

Ex-LCers say that Nancy Bradeen Spannaus was the leading figure in enforcing the quasi-mandatory abortion policy for LaRouchian women–first, in New York City (where the NCLC national office was located in the 1970s and early 1980s), and later in Leesburg, Va. (to which the headquarters staff and many other cadre were moved in stages during the early and middle 1980s). Ms. Spannaus’s informal group of anti-childbirth women–who would exert the heavy psychological pressure on those who became pregnant, march them to the abortion clinic and stay to make sure the job was done–became known as the “coat-hanger brigade.” It is estimated by ex-members that Ms. Spannaus and other enforcers were responsible for hundreds of abortions by NCLC women nationwide. Curiously, Ms. Spannaus and her husband Ed (see FN 3) had two sons of their own, born in 1970 and 1971 before LaRouche had developed the total control within the NCLC that would make possible the enforcing of such intimate control over the bodies of female cadre. Although Ms. Spannaus thereafter worked ruthlessly to prevent other women in the organization from having children, these same women were expected to make great displays of sympathy for her when her older son was killed in a car crash while home from college on vacation in 1990. ⁽¹⁾

Eaglebeak ^(*) writes about Nancy Spannaus:

Dennis King is certainly right that Nancy Spannaus was one of the primary enforcers of the mandatory-abortions policy throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and I write this as a witness to some of her enormities. To be fair, though, in 1989—the year in which, Lyndon LaRouche and Nancy’s husband Ed Spannaus and other Labor Committee members had gone off to Federal prison for mail fraud, etc., and the year in which Nancy decided to run for Senate from Virginia—when a number (at least five) Labor Committee infants were conceived and born in Leesburg, Nancy didn’t interfere much at all.
Maybe because, surprising many, she decided to run on a pro-life platform. That was certainly odd….
In the 1990s, Nancy basically told Helga Zepp LaRouche, the arch-abortion-monger, that she would no longer enforce the policy.
As to the death of Michael Spannaus in 1990, everyone in Leesburg was devastated. We had known Michael all his life.
The bottom line is that Nancy Spannaus has been psychologically destroyed by her long association with Lyndon LaRouche, which has featured some terrible moments, including leaving her husband twice on Lyn’s say-so, hounding women to have abortions, helping to drive Ken Kronberg to suicide—Nancy and Ken had a very close relationship; she was his “boss,” in effect, and also the person charged with “paying” PMR (that is, driving it to destruction). Nancy has a lot to answer for, but it is important to remember that she has been for decades a victim as well as a victimizer.
That’s why they call it a cult.

(*) Comments received on 08/24/08. Eaglebeak is a frequent poster on Factnet.org and a former longtime member of the LaR org with extremely detailed knowledge of the Leesburg organization, the leadership circles of the organization, and the case of Ken Kronberg.

Interestingly, LaRouche would say a few years later: “The question of abortion has become a fraudulent question, in society, because of the so-called “right to life” organization.” ⁽³⁾

Nancy Spannaus’s antisemitism:

“Israel’s founders were neurotic and proto-fascist; Rockefeller’s intervention has wrought a nation ruled by psychotics. Now, having created a largely psychotic, captive population out of Israel by encircling it with hostile armies, Rockefeller is prepared to destroy the Zionists – whom he had found so useful – in order to prevent the establishment of a new world economic order based on expanded trade and production, a system which would take the final prop from underneath his crumbling financial empire. Like the Warsaw ghetto, the work camps at Auschwitz, and the death camp at Treblinka, Israel is to be rewarded for good behavior by extinction.[…] The Tavistock schemers have come dangerously close to accomplishing their goal of creating a model concentration camp out of Israel. Policed by a Nazi-like labor front, squeezed economically at a deadly rate, bombarded by “friend” and foe alike with the threat of total extermination – the Israeli population is being submerged in psychotic holocaust.” ⁽⁴⁾

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