By Dave Andrusko
Jeremy Hunt, Health Secretary
When pro-abortionists defend abortion on grounds they share with only a tiny percentage of the population, this exercise in truth-telling can serve a number of purposes besides documenting their extremism.
There‘s been a furor in Great Britain over the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) not to prosecute two abortionists who were willing to abort female babies, not because there wasn’t sufficient evidence, but because prosecution would not be in the “public interest.” This astonishing conclusion followed a 19-month investigation spurred by the uncover work of Daily Telegraph demonstrated beyond dispute that there are abortionists in England who will abort a child because the mother says she does not want a girl.
Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, wrote to Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, pressing for a full explanation. And according to Telegraph health reporter Alice Philipson “A group of 50 MPs, drawn from across the party divide, then wrote to this newspaper warning that the decision was a ‘step back in the fight for gender equality’ and effectively changes the law without proper authority.” Many others protested and even some “pro-choicers” seemed reluctant to give a nod to sex-selection abortion.
But one of the leading pro-abortion voices in Great Britain disagrees. Ann Furedi is chief executive of BPAS, which performs about a quarter of the abortions (55,000) in England and Wales , and is very active internationally. Furedi wrote a piece for the online magazine “Spiked” in which she argued that the language of the 1967 Abortion Act is expansive enough (or vague enough) to allow for sex-selection abortions.
Under the Act, abortion is legal when two doctors agree that “the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, to the physical or mental health of the woman or any existing children of her family.”
Using that as her hook, Furedi wrote, “‘A doctor agreeing to an abortion on grounds of rape would be breaking the law no more and no less than a doctor who agrees an abortion on grounds of sex selection.”
Other pro-abortion feminists go even further. Writing in the militantly pro-abortion Guardian newspaper, Sara Ditum says she may be even more radical than Furedi. Furedi, Ditum explained, argued that abortion is allowed for many reasons that are not spelled out in the 1967 Abortion Act, and therefore, arguably, the Act would allow sex-selection abortions as well.
To those who say it is the height of hypocrisy for women to abort women on the grounds that they are women, Ditum says
“The answer is actually remarkably simple, and it’s this: it doesn’t matter whether what’s growing inside you is liable to end up as a man or a woman. …. In a world where it’s possible to end a pregnancy safely and legally, it seems like rank brutality to force anyone to carry to term against her will.”
Pro-lifers see this as the unfurling of the catastrophe first begun in 1967. Jack Scarisbrick, of LIFE, said the 1967 Abortion Act should be the subject of an immediate inquiry by the Department of Health and the CPS.
“The mental health clause amounts to abortion on demand,” he told columnist Chris Pleasance.
“Why has the Department of Health not stamped out the conveyor-belting of women through the abortion clinics?’
He described abortion in Britain as a ‘runaway bus’, asking: “How else could gender-selection abortion – aborting unborn girls simply because they are female – be potentially widely available in abortion clinics across the country?”
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