It’s difficult from this side of the pond to understand exactly what this means (if anything), but according to the British newspaper, The Daily Mail, the Chief Medical Officer (Dame Sally Davies) “is to write to all GPs to make it plain that abortions carried out solely on the grounds of the sex of the child are wrong.”
The Daily Mail said “The fact that the letter will be sent out to all family doctors was revealed in an answer to a Parliamentary question by public health minister Jane Ellison earlier this month.”
Presumably this is response to two developments. As NRL News Today reported earlier this month, Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, decided not to prosecute two abortionists who were caught on camera agreeing to perform sex-selection abortions on a woman posing as a patient. Starmer said that while there were grounds to prosecute the men, it would not be in the “public interest.”
Emboldened by Starmer’s stance, Ann Furedi, the chief executive of the abortion behemoth British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), wrote on a website that “doctors are legally free to terminate pregnancies when the parents are unhappy with the sex of the child,” explained the Daily Mail’s Daniel Martin.
Under the 1967 Abortion 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.”
Furedi, whose business performs about a quarter of all the abortions in England and Wales, is no stranger to controversy. And her remarks posted on the online magazine “Spiked” stirred a hornet’s nest of controversy.
Yet as the newspaper story points out, one of the major reasons Starmer ruled the way he did was that “the law at the moment was not clear enough because it does not specifically say that abortions should not go ahead on the grounds of the sex of the baby.”
Another revelation that came out of the undercover work of the Daily Telegraph was that abortionists were side-stepping one of the few requirements– that, except in emergencies, two doctors must agree for a woman to have an abortion. “Spot checks at more than 250 abortion clinics last year found evidence of blank forms being signed in anticipation of patients seeking a termination,” Martin wrote.
According to Martin, Dame Sally’s letter “is an attempt to set out the steps they should take to ensure an abortion is within the law.”
Public health minister Ellison added that after the letter was sent out, the Department of Health “would then work with relevant royal colleges and medical bodies to keep the guidance under review.”
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We’ll have to wait to see if authorities really see sex-selection abortions as a violation of the 1967 Abortion Act. Hopefully, they will.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in his National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
