By DEXTER DUGGAN
Although initial news reports said the British government would affirm the law there against sex-selection abortions, Europe’s largest pro-life organization issued a statement in late May saying this apparent restriction required explanation.
The major British daily The Telegraph posted on May 22 that the government was “expected to say that doctors who carry out abortions based on the sex of an unborn baby and pre-sign abortion forms [without evaluating the patient] are breaking the law.”
The story quoted Conservative Party Member of Parliament David Burrowes:
“It is a very helpful clarification from the government. As a matter of principle and practice, gender selection is thoroughly outlawed by this government, as well as pre-signing….For too long, professionals and others have been able to use the cover of ambiguity, have been able to allow gender selection to take place.”
This followed some British news stories last year that the British Medical Association (BMA) reportedly told doctors “there may be circumstances in which termination of pregnancy on grounds of fetal sex would be lawful.”
In a story posted October 7, The Telegraph reported, “The [BMA] disclosure is expected to spark fury among dozens of [members of Parliament] who have criticized the medical establishment for seeking to redefine abortion laws” on its own.
However, on May 27, the United Kingdom’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), Europe’s largest and the world’s oldest pro-life organization, provided The Wanderer with two statements explaining why recent news reports needed a closer look.
SPUC’s general secretary, Paul Tully, said, “We welcome the government’s messages that abortion on the grounds of sex alone is wrong; that doctors must not pre-sign abortion authorization forms; and that doctors cannot form a proper opinion of a woman’s condition without ever seeing her. These messages, however, are neither groundbreaking nor robust.
“The Department of Health and the abortion industry have a close and ugly relationship,” Tully continued. “The department contracts out millions of pounds’ worth of abortions to the private sector, which is keen to provide abortions . . . to all comers,” funded by the National Health Service. “The department also acts in Parliament as the defender of the pro-abortion lobby, briefing ministers and promoting policies that undermine the law.”
In an additional statement provided to The Wanderer, Tully said, “The guidance published…shows the grip that the pro-abortion Sexual Health Team (SHT) has on abortion policy. It arrogantly presumes to assert that abortion on grounds of the baby’s sex is illegal while allowing the abortion industry to carry on aborting other ‘unwanted’ babies — despite the evidence of harm to women resulting from such abortions.
“Aborting babies because they are girls is the only bad reason, according to the feminist thinking which dominates the SHT’s agenda,” he said. “Aborting so-called unwanted babies in general — in particular those of the poor, racial minorities, and unwed mothers — should carry on uninterrupted, according to the SHT.
“Those with financial or other ulterior interests in promoting [the] abortion industry — including medical bodies like the [Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists] and the wealthy private abortion clinics — will not have their activities significantly curtailed,” Tully said.
“The SHT shows contempt for the wishes of Parliament, which clearly requires that mental or physical health risks of continuing a pregnancy outweigh the risks entailed in abortion. We have always maintained that abortion is bad medicine, and is neither necessary to avoid risks to physical health nor helpful in reducing harm to mental health,” the SPUC official said.
“Abortion on physical-health grounds is now hardly ever proposed. Nearly all abortions, apart from those on disabled babies, are performed because two doctors claim (supposedly independently) that there is a risk to mental health,” he said.
“The SHT guidance is wrong in law where it states (paragraph 13) that the threshold of risk to mental health for legal abortion is simply a matter of the doctor’s opinion,” Tully said. “The law states that the threshold of risk is the comparison between continuing the pregnancy and aborting the baby.
“The doctor must form an opinion as to which risk is greater. He is not free to decide that a minor or minimal risk to mental health justifies an abortion if he knows the damage to mental health of undergoing an abortion would be the same or greater,” he said.
“Yet every week, hundreds of doctors sign statutory forms certifying medical grounds for abortion which the Department of Health’s own evidence review has shown to be false,” Tully said. He added that apparently “the secretary of state will continue to use his discretion to grant licenses to abortion clinics where doctors do not bother even to see or talk to mothers — often in desperate straits — before signing away the lives of unborn children.”
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