An investigation by the Telegraph newspaper has found that some British abortion clinics are agreeing to terminate pregnancies based on the sex of the unborn baby — a practice which is not just immoral, but illegal under UK law.
Undercover reporters accompanied a number of pregnant women to clinics where they asked for their unborn baby to be terminated because it was the “wrong sex.” In some cases, Asian women carrying baby girls asked for the abortion on “cultural” grounds; in others, the women cited a desire for “family balancing.”
Some of the clinics approached explained that they could not perform sex-selection abortions, but others agreed to carry out the procedure. In most cases no counseling was offered, and one doctor was secretly filmed telling a women who enquired about having her baby girl aborted: “I don’t ask questions.”
The Telegraph has said it will publish further disclosures from its investigation tomorrow. Britain’s Health Secretary has said he will report the clinics caught in the sting to the police and the General Medical Council, the medical profession’s governing body.
The exposé is welcome, and will be a setback for the UK’s increasingly assertive pro-abortion movement. But it only hints at a wider, ongoing, and largely tolerated scandal.
In 2010, according to government figures, just under 190,000 abortions were carried out in England and Wales, and of those, 98% were carried out on the grounds that going through with the pregnancy carried a risk to the woman’s mental health. Pro-life campaigners have long alleged that the “mental health” provision is routinely abused and amounts to abortion-on-demand, and the Telegraph report lends credence to those claims: if abortion clinics are prepared to perform blatantly illegal sex-selection terminations, one can only imagine how widely the subjective “mental health” provision is being exploited.
Commenting on the Telegraph report, Anthony Ozimic, spokesman for British pro-life organization Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, said:
This investigation confirms the reality of eugenics in modern British medicine, in which some innocent human beings are deemed too inconvenient to be allowed to live. 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 current laws and regulations are loosely interpreted and routinely flouted. The abortion lobby are shedding crocodile tears over sex-selective abortion because it calls the abortion industry and their feminist credentials into question.
Anyone who doubts, as the row over HHS contraception mandate rages on, where America is headed if Obamacare isn’t repealed should note that 96% of the abortions performed in 2010 were funded by the National Health Service — that is, by British taxpayers — yet while there’s an active pro-life lobby in the UK, abortion is nothing like as big an issue here as it is in the U.S. Perhaps this scandal will help to generate a new and badly needed debate.
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