The Guardian headline said it all:
Anti-abortion group drafted in as sexual health adviser to Government
Coalition appoints pro-abstinence charity LIFE to key sexual health forum while omitting British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS)”
The story related to the appointment of LIFE to the Department of Health’s Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV.
Within a very short time there were rising 800 comments the great majority of them backing the Guardian and BPAS. You could see that many of the contributors were almost foaming at the mouth.
I decided to add my “pen’orth” and send in a comment. I wrote:
‘Reading the story (with its slant) and wading through the comments confirms my long- held view that the Guardian and its readers are made up of the biggest bigots in history’. “Agree with all we say or shut up and get out!”’
However, the next day, (Thursday May 26) the Guardian had a change of heart, and Deborah Orr, a pro-abortion feminist (there are Pro-Life Feminists), wrote a column urging that feminists should not “try to stifle debates about abortion”.
Sadly, however, she blotted her copy-book by claiming:
“LIFE will never win the argument, because it is anti-choice. Logic is on the pro-choice side, let alone practicality. A long history of desperation, squalor and tragedy illustrates how dangerous it is to deny women access to simple medical procedures that offer us control of our lives, our bodies and the planning of our family.”
Obviously, she just repeated the usual pro-abortion mantra without doing her homework. For years, the pro-abortion lobby has got away with blatant lies about the threat of so-called back- street abortions (a very high number of which – before the Abortion Act – were carried out in private clinics which are still operating today on the “front streets”). Invariably they refer to “coat-hanger abortions” – although I have yet to discover a woman so stupid as not to recognise how dangerous such a procedure would be!
The anti-life lobby use this technique to frighten people about what could happen if the abortion law were changed. The late Dr. Bernard Nathanson (see right), who originally led the pro-abortion movement in the USA and later became pro-life, exposed their tactics. In this country, you only have to check the mortality figures to see they are talking absolute nonsense.
However, when it comes to abortion, contraception and euthanasia, the Guardian, like the BBC, rarely allow research and the facts get in the way of a nice frightening claim! For example, on March 21, 2007 the Guardian carried an item on abortion in Poland (where strong abortion restrictions were put in place in 1993). The article claimed:
“illegal abortion… is thriving… Polish NGOs (Non-Government Organisations) estimate some 200,000 women are having back street abortions every year”.
That is by no means the only time that the Guardian has made such claims. However, one only has to examine the official Health figures to show they are talking nonsense. With illegal acts, there are no official figures to prove whether any such claims are right or wrong. Nonetheless, there are other ways of measuring the truth:
Hospital admissions for incomplete abortion or miscarriage is one way.
Maternal deaths is another.
It is easy enough to check the figures in the Council of Europe Demographic Year Book. From this you can see that in Poland the number of miscarriages dropped from 46,970 in 1994 to 41,381 in 2003. There is no way there would be such a drop if women were having back- street abortions.
One can also see that deaths due to pregnancy and child-birth dropped from 36 in 1994, to 23 in 2003. This hardly suggests a huge increase of 200,000 in illegal abortions.
I am well aware that the pro-abortion lobby will claim that Polish doctors will register back-street abortion deaths under some other category. However, yet again, one needs only to check on total deaths in women in their main child-bearing years (15-49) to see that this is utterly untrue. The Poles, God bless them, do bury their dead! If back street abortion deaths were reported under other categories, there would still be an increase in total reported deaths in women in their main child-bearing years from 1994 – 2003 and onwards.
You will find (just as I found when checking on back street abortion deaths in England and Wales) that the facts do not substantiate the claims. In fact, they make their claims without a scrap of evidence.
Moreover, there are two other countries which show the nonsense of pro-abortion claims:
Some years ago, Chile changed its legislation, outlawing all abortions and giving the unborn child equal protection with his/her mother. The result? Chile now has the lowest maternal mortality rate of any country in South America (see pg. 25) – with the result that other countries in that region of the world are now considering laws to follow their example.
The Republic of Ireland is another country which makes the anti-life lobby froth at the mouth. Like Chile – they have an absolute law against abortion... zero tolerance for destruction of the unborn child. And they have the lowest maternal mortality rate in the world (see pg. 24). The maternal death rate in Ireland is 1 per 100,000 compared with 8 per 100,000 for the United Kingdom (see pg. 27)... with all our liberal laws!
It seems that the kind of medicine which inspires protection for the unborn child also inspires greater protection for the mother.
