Judge rules midwives must cooperate with abortions

News is out today about two Scottish midwives who have just lost their legal battle to opt out of supervising other midwives who are performing abortions.  The Catholic Herald reports on it here.

The midwives "argued that they had never been required to supervise abortion procedures in the past, and that the hospital was asking them to be morally, medically and legally responsible for abortions".  Despite the fact that the Abortion Act 1967 allows for opt-out in the case of conscientious objection - "no person shall be under any legal duty, whether by contract or by any statutory or other legal requirement, to participate in any treatment authorised by this Act to which he has a conscientious objection" (Section 4(1)), this being only subject to the subsection 4(2) which maintains the person's duty to participate in treatment necessary to save life or prevent grave permanent injury to the pregnant woman's physical or mental health - Lady Smith ruled at the Court of Session in Edinburgh that the midwives' supervisory role was not covered by this clause.

It is difficult to see how overseeing a midwife performing an abortion is not participating in the abortion, which presumably would not go ahead without the correct supervision.  It is surely material cooperation.  Where does such a judgement logically leave a number of other medical personnel with peripheral or facilitatory roles in the abortion process?  There are several roles involving promoting, condoning or cooperating in the abortion other than that of the person who actually performs the act itself.

SPUC have been supporting the women in their case and Paul Tully, SPUC's general secretary, said “We are very disappointed by the judgment. SPUC has supported the midwives in bringing their case, and will now be considering their further legal options with them."

Is the law really an ass, or just prepared to ignore the safeguards it has itself put in place?  The Guild of Catholic Doctors (UK) suggests, "The reality is that there is little any law framed like the Act can do to provide significant safeguards once the concept of abortion becomes acceptable".  Scary stuff.  Please pray for these brave ladies and their battle to uphold the right to follow one's conscience.  It is especially poignant that this judgement is affecting midwives, whose primary role is to help bring new life into the world, not snuff it out.

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.