British Doctors Won’t be Charged With Doing Illegal Sex-Selection Abortions

International   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Sep 4, 2013   |   6:00PM   |   London, England

British doctors found to be doing illegal sex-selection abortions will not face criminal charges, according to a new report.

Sex-selection abortion is an epidemic in nations like China and India, where cultural mores cause citizens to force male babies over females. But with people from those nations and other Asian countries where men are favored moving to nations like Great Britain, they are apparently taking the practice with them and finding abortion practitioners willing to do the abortions.

A government report earlier this year found signs that birth rates for girls and boys vary noticeably according to where their mothers were born. A health minister said that these differences in rates of male and female births among mothers of certain nationalities may “fall outside the range considered possible without intervention”.

In February 2012, two abortion practitioners in England were suspended for their roles in facilitating illegal sex-selection abortions as exposed by an undercover investigation the London Telegraph newspaper led. Now the Telegraph says they will not face charges.

Doctors who agreed to arrange illegal abortions based on the sex of an unborn baby have been told they will not face criminal charges, despite prosecutors admitting that there is enough evidence to take them to court, it emerged on Wednesday night.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was accused of failing to uphold the law after it ruled that it would not be in the “public interest” to prosecute the two doctors exposed in an undercover Daily Telegraph investigation.

Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, on Wednesday night voiced alarm about the decision which he raised with the Attorney General.

The two doctors were filmed agreeing to arrange terminations for women who requested them purely because they said they did not want to have a baby girl.

One of the doctors did so despite likening the practice to “female infanticide” while the other told a woman her job was not to “ask questions”.

The CPS acknowledged, following a 19-month inquiry, that there was sufficient evidence to warrant a prosecution with a “realistic prospect of conviction”. But it told police that a “public interest test” had not been met.

Dr Peter Saunders, chief executive of the Christian Medical Fellowship, who was among those who complained to police, accused the GMC of failing to have the courage to apply the criminal law.

“We seem to have a situation where, at the whim of the CPS, procedures that are clearly laid out in the Abortion Act can be completely disregarded by doctors and the NHS,” he said.

“That seems to put doctors above the law and raises questions about the CPS upholding the will of Parliament.

“We seem to have doctors being allowed to reinterpret the law with apparent impunity – it is quite extraordinary.”

David Burrowes, a Tory MP on the All-party Parliamentary Pro-life Group, said: “I would be extremely disappointed if they [the CPS] were seeking to put themselves in the position of politicians and Parliament by trying to suggest that this is not an offence that should be preceuted.

“That is a matter for Parliament and not for prosecutors, I would be very concerned and very interested to look at whether they have overstepped the mark.”

Pro-life advocates have been up in arms about the illegal abortions.

LIFE Spokesman Mark Bhagwandin says “For too long the industry has consistently abused, and in cases flagrantly broken the law on abortion with seeming impunity. In an industry where in practice there is abortion on demand it is no surprise that some abortionists see no problem terminating an unborn child simply because it is the wrong gender.”

“So vague and open to interpretation is the wording of Ground C that in the case reported the woman did not have to state she had a problem with her baby being a girl as she could simply have presented for an abortion under mental health conditions as happens in nine out of ten of the 200,000 abortion cases every year,” Bhagwandin continues. “The abortion law is wide open to interpretation of what counts as mental health issues. Indeed the definition and diagnosis of mental health issues is regularly made by GPs who do not specialize in psychiatric evaluation. If so many women are suffering mental health problems and require abortion, we will have failed them if we do not see a role for proper psychiatric evaluation. Indeed this failure can easily be seen in the abortion statistics showing that one in every three women who has an abortion has had at least one previous one. These women are not helped by offering the abortion conveyor belt as a solution to their crisis pregnancy. Women deserve better than this.”

The Life representative added, “We share the public’s anger to the revelation of sex selection abortions; we would like to see a similar response to the wanton termination, up to birth, of disabled babies in the womb.  Surely it is as morally questionable to end a human life because he/she is disabled as it is for being of the wrong gender?”

Representatives with the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), a leading pro-life group in England, say sex-selection abortion is an inevitable consequence of easy access to abortion.

Anthony Ozimic, SPUC’s communications manager, commented: “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 government needs to cut its ties to private abortion providers and to abortion rights organisations, as they are complict in sex-selective abortion domestically and internationally.”