The bad news and the good news

Mr Lansley discovers some appalling facts

Today in the news we read that abortion clinics have undergone unannounced spot checks by order of Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary; out of a sample of 250 clinics, about 20% were found to be "non-compliant" with legal regulations.  Following the Telegraph's revelations earlier this month about clinics which agree to perform gender-selective abortions, it now emerges that some clinics are allowing doctors to pre-sign abortion certificates without knowing anything about the women concerned.  Whilst there is no obligation for the doctors to have personally seen a particular patient, it is illegal for them to sign forms authorising abortion without having read and assessed the patient's clinical case notes taken by a medical colleague.  You can read the story here and here.

We should not be surprised that this sort of practice is taking place.  It is merely confirmation that abortion on demand is, in reality, the situation we now have in the UK, arising from the pro-abortion lobby's largely successful attempts to convince women that they have a "right" to abortion.  Mr Lansley himself sums the situation up pretty well.  To quote from the Telegraph article:

"[Mr Lansley] said yesterday that the regulator had found that a number of clinics may be acting beyond the 'spirit and letter of the law'. 

" 'I was appalled,' he said. 'Because if it happens, it is pretty much people engaging in a culture of both ignoring the law and trying to give themselves the right to say that although Parliament may have said this, we believe in abortion on demand.'

"He said it was not just a matter of enforcing the law. 'There is the risk that women don’t get the appropriate level of pre-abortion support and counselling because, if your attitude is that, "You’ve arrived for an abortion and you should have one," well actually many women don’t get the degree of support they should,' said Mr Lansley."

And yet this type of clinic may shortly be advertising itself on TV with no obligation to mention that it has a financial interest in offering abortions...?  With reference to our earlier post on the topic, is this really "safe" for women and their babies?

This is all a prime example of our society's muddled thinking when it comes to life issues.  Whether through misguided compassion or just not wanting to see a truth that is hard or inconvenient, we have allowed ourselves to fall into all sorts of illogicalities with regard to the issue of abortion.  The BBC news website quotes the Health Secretary as saying, "Abortion shouldn't be undertaken lightly and the right checks and balances should be in place."  Does he ask himself why it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly?  Because either the foetus is not a human being/is part of the woman’s body and therefore she has a right to choose whether it stays there/abortion has no negative psychological effects, or the opposite things are true... there isn’t really some sort of indeterminate middle ground.

And yet... we can find hope in these revelations, because at least the truth of what is happening in many abortion clinics is finally surfacing and perhaps prompting some to think the issues through again.  Grumpy old woman that I am, I would never have thought of looking at it that way, and therefore am very grateful to a wise priest of our diocese who remarked earlier today, "It would be easy to despair as we read more and more about the issues but I believe that the Holy Spirit is fighting back by making these abhorrent practices more public. By bringing them into the 'daylight' the beginning of a cleansing is happening. No more is it being performed 'in the dark,' where the devil lives, but, increasingly, in the light where Christ's redemptive power is seen to be at work so visibly."

He added, "I am sure the devil will want to stop these articles 'asap' so it is up to us to keep them in the public forum."  It may not be New Year but I think that would be a pretty good resolution to make anyway, right here and now.  So help us God.

Sex selective abortions

This morning The Daily Telegraph is leading with a story on sex selective abortions being carried out with "no questions asked" here in the UK. Undercover reporters accompanied pregnant women to nine different abortion clinics and secretly filmed the conversations had with the doctors (one of which can be viewed on the Telegraph's page, see link above). Despite sex selective abortions being illegal in this country this was overlooked and ignored by the doctors in question with one of them even saying, "I don't ask questions. You want a termination, you want a termination. ... That's my job..." On learning of the report Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said, "I’m extremely concerned to hear about these allegations. Sex selection is illegal and is morally wrong. I've asked my officials to investigate this as a matter of urgency."

One thing that immediately strikes me about this story (although it is not the main issue) is the hypocrisy of it all. We live in a country which has spent a lot of time and energy in making men and women social equals, for instance in the workplace you cannot hire or fire or give a pay rise to one person just because they are male or female. We live in a country where discrimination against gender is, quite rightly, not tolerated...but for some reason this is now only extended to a person once they are outside the womb. This is the ultimate form of gender discrimination and yet it is allowed to occur behind closed doors. Other "reasons" are cited, excuses made, loopholes found (for example going private to avoid certain questions from the NHS) and a baby dies.

So how and why has this disturbing state of events been able to come about? There has been a great deal of anger and condemnation of these events since this story broke from both pro-life and pro-choice voices but, to a certain extent, this is not actually surprising at all.

Before you can honestly and thoroughly start to examine how the notion of killing an unborn child just because he or she is a boy or girl has taken hold in the UK you have to take a long, hard, realistic look at what abortion is in the first place. No matter how clinics or pro-choice advocates try to play it down (for example by calling the unborn child a "clump of cells" or whatever else) abortion is the intentional killing of another human person. Whilst it is not our place (and nor would we ever want to) to judge those who have had abortions in the past there is nothing that can change this fact. And in the UK abortion is available "on demand"; if you don't want to keep your child you can go into a clinic and they will organise a termination for you. Since it was legalised in 1967 it has become more and more acceptable to end your pregnancy if you can't afford to have a baby, if you don't wan't a baby, if your partner doesn't want a baby, if your baby is disabled or if, especially during IVF, there are "too many" babies. When you consider the attitude towards pregnancies where the child will be born with Down's Syndrome (for one example), where the child won't be "normal", it is not that great a leap for our culture to terminate one simply because the baby will be born the "wrong" sex. Children have become a commodity and with that they become disposable when they are not precisely what we want them to be. This attitude has come out of the easy, "no questions asked" access to abortions over the decades (as outlined in SPUC's statement here.) Sex selective abortions are, quite literally, the tip of the iceberg and what makes this so abhorrent is not simply the reason a girl could be killed just for being a girl, it is the fact that a child died in the first place. All abortion at any stage is totally and utterly wrong, completely immoral and the only way to properly address this recent and disturbing development in the attitudes towards sex selection are to change the way people see abortion in the first place. The law needs to be changed, life needs to be cherished, respected and loved in all its forms. Somehow our culture has forgotten this or tries to forget it when the truth of the beauty and dignity of all human life  becomes inconvenient and needs, desperately, to re-learn it and soon.