Undercover sting: UK abortion clinics performing illegal abortions, ‘no questions asked’

From LifeSiteNews:

Undercover sting: UK abortion clinics performing illegal abortions, ‘no questions asked’

Hilary White, Rome Correspondent

Thu Feb 23 11:58 EST

Abortion

MANCHESTER, February 23, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – British abortion facilities are conducting illegal abortions, including for reasons of sex-selection, an undercover investigation by the Daily Telegraph has revealed. The report has triggered an investigation into abortion practices by the Department of Health.

Pro-life leaders, however, have responded with a complete lack of surprise, saying that the permissiveness of current law and society makes sex-selective abortion “inevitable.”

The Telegraph’s investigation simply confirms “the reality of eugenics in modern British medicine” said Anthony Ozimic, communications director for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC).

Telegraph reporters accompanied pregnant women to nine abortion facilities around the country. In three of these, doctors were recorded “offering to arrange terminations after being told the mother-to-be did not want to go ahead with the pregnancy because of the sex of the unborn child.”

In one case in Manchester, the doctor asked the woman if she was sure of her reasons. The woman responded, “Oh, absolutely … I can’t have it, this baby, because of the gender, so that’s just how it is.” The abortion was booked for the following week with no further questions asked. 

UK law technically requires that abortions occur only for the approved reasons, which do not currently include sex-selection. But at one facility a woman was told by a medical consultant, “I don’t ask questions. If you want a termination, you want a termination.”

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley responded to the revelations, saying he is “extremely concerned.” Sex selection is still technically illegal in Britain, and Lansley called it “morally wrong.”

“If this is happened not only is it criminal act but it entails professionals falsifying the reports. It’s a shocking thing to have happened. We will follow it up urgently,” he said.

The Department of Health has also said that it is following up on the allegations. “Following this mornings reports in the Telegraph, we will be speaking to the police,” they said in a statement. “Criminal offences may have been committed and we will take urgent action. We will be speaking to the GMC to ask them to investigate individual clinicians and we have asked the Care Quality Commission to urgently inspect the named clinics.

While the Telegraph’s story is making waves among some politicians, pro-life leaders have long pointed out that the surviving legal restrictions on abortion are effectively meaningless. Joseph Lee, spokesman for the SPUC in Scotland, told LifeSiteNews.com that these revelations might be shocking to the general public, they will “shock none who are active in the pro-life movement.”

The abortion lobby, he said, has a stance “rooted firmly in the ideology of ‘choice.’”
“How can they do anything other than defend a woman’s right to choose to abort her child simply because the child is female?

“Maybe when society wakes up to the fact that so-called ‘women’s rights’ are being used to kill girls, it will start to question the radically pro-abortion culture that it has accepted for the past 45 years.”

Andrew Stephenson, the head of Abort 67 – a group that confronts the abortion industry head on with street displays of graphic images of aborted children – commented, “How can the Department of Health recognise the immorality of killing people based on their gender but accept all the other reasons that women have abortions?”

Stephenson’s work brings him into daily contact with abortion-minded women. He said, “One girl who came across us in Brighton told us she had an abortion because she didn’t think her dog would cope with a baby.”

“Some innocent human beings are deemed too inconvenient to be allowed to live,” Anthony Ozimic said. “Sex-selective abortion is an inevitable consequence of easy access to abortion, a situation to which the pro-abortion lobby has no convincing answer.

“The government needs to cut its ties to private abortion providers and to abortion rights organisations”

He pointed out that the British government is already actively “complicit” in supporting sex-selective abortions through China’s population control programs. He observed that there is wide support in Parliament for further loosening of existing abortion restrictions despite the fact that the status quo already effectively provides abortion-on-demand.

Politicians are under constant pressure to abolish all restrictions on abortion from bodies such as the British Medical Association, which wants to see midwives qualified to abort children. Even labor unions, traditionally powerful on the left, have declared they will lobby for abortion on demand.

Under current British law, abortions are technically restricted to a particular set of criteria. The age limit for an abortion for children deemed healthy is 24 weeks gestation, and abortion is allowed for reasons of “mental health” of the woman or “any existing children.” Women are free to give any reason for abortion that fits the legal criteria and no system exists for confirmation.

Since the Abortion Act was amended in 1990, there are no restrictions at all on killing children with disabilities, a change that pro-life leaders denounced as outright endorsement of eugenics. While the law states that abortions can be carried out only with the signature of two physicians, it has been revealed that most abortion facilities keep stacks of pre-signed permission forms on hand, making this “restriction” effectively meaningless.

The British government does keep and publish records of the number of abortions that fall under each category, and these have shown that the numbers of eugenic abortions have skyrocketed since the amendment. Thousands of British children are killed every year for non-lethal conditions such as Down’s syndrome or cleft palate or club foot.