Wednesday 30 March 2011

Myra Hindley was 'pro-choice'...

...until she became a Catholic, that is, and became 'pro-life'. The only difference is that Myra Hindley exercised her choice to kill other people's children.

Tom Chivers has written a Telegraph blog post entitled 'Abortion and the Right to Know'.


In the post, he maintains...


'I don’t want to get into the abortion debate as a whole, especially. Regular readers will know I’m firmly pro-choice, but I acknowledge that, for people who believe (I don’t) that human life begins at conception, it is indistinguishable from murder. It’s an important debate and a serious one, but not one to be had here.'

That's convenient. Needless to say, however, the debate is being had there anyway, in the comments section. He has taken to task Frank Field and Nadine Dorris and others over a website advocating the 'Right to Know' of expectant mothers concerning the psychological trauma caused by abortion that affects a percentage of those who undergo the ghastly procedure. According to the website...

'The Right to Know Campaign is backing an amendment to the Health and Social Care Bill being laid by Nadine Dorries MP and Rt Hon. Frank Field MP. The amendment would ensure that women considering an abortion would be guaranteed access to independent information and advice from someone who had no vested financial interest in the outcome of their decision.'

Quite how they would ensure access to this is anyone's guess. Would the Government not be relying heavily on the BPAS and Marie Stopes International to distribute this information? How compliant would they be with regulations such as that? Such a move might hit their abortion rates and that would mean less profit.

The percentage quoted on the website is that of '30% of women' who procure abortions and who are traumatised as a result. Tom asks what the source of the percentage is and tells us that a link to a study doesn't feature on the website. He is right. He therefore keeps the remit of his blog post very slim. The question is, does it really matter what the percentage is? Even if it were only 1%, that one percent of women deserve access to information so that they may know of the experiences of others. Abortion, yes, even in schools, is shrouded in secrecy. People tend not to tell everyone they're going to have one. It's not like getting a tattoo. And ,after all, abortion clinics themselves don't ask their customers to fill out a customer survey form asking whether they feel, post-abortion, a) uplifted, b) relieved, c) terribly guilty, d) depressed or e) traumatised. Perhaps someone knows different, but I doubt that post-abortion care is particularly caring.

The 'Right to Know' website looks very good. I expect that ultimately Field and Dorris wish to see a reduction in abortions, rather than the outright ban that the abortion industry truly deserves, but still, this is quite an important development in the debate that Marie Stopes and the BPAS wish to close rather than see open in the UK. Women do deserve to know the truth about abortion. Society makes light of an issue over which women have actually committed suicide. They also deserve to see the ultrasound scan of the little baby in their wombs, before they make the decision of whether or not to destroy their baby's lives and to do terrible damage to their own. Interesting, isn't it, that Tom Chivers decided to focus on whether the rate of trauma is 30% or not, instead of putting up this video, on the website, of one woman's story of the destructive personal effects of abortion? But then, the last thing that the abortion industry and those in the media who support its practice, want to slip out into the mainstream media, is the truth.

3 comments:

Clare@ BattlementsOfRubies said...

That girls story moved me to tears.
Abortion is devastating.

georgem said...

I am always amazed that among the greatest proponents of pro-choice, ie abortion, is a sizeable proportion of men. Why would that be, I wonder.

PaulineG said...

Laurence,

You may be interested to know that in 2008 the Royal College of Psychiatrists moved from asserting an absence of psychological risk from abortion to acknowledging emerging evidence from 'some studies' of 'a range of mental disorders following abortion' and undertook to review the research evidence and report (still awaited). Meanwhile they advised that informed consent [to abortion] would require provision of 'adequate and appropriate information on risks'.

The new RCOG guidelines on 'the care of women requesting induced abortion', by contrast, state that women should be told that most women who have abortions do not experience "adverse psychological sequelae". [Posh word adds credibilty, don't you think?].

Whether that is true or not it is beside the point. Women must be warned of any risk of adverse consequences and this formulation, while not necessarily denying such risk, effectively instructs practitioners not to mention it.

There is much more to be said about these guidelines. I will email you.

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