The British publication, The Daily Mail, has done some outstanding investigative reporting on abortion. Adding to its terrific work exposing the willingness of abortionists to perform sex-selective abortions, on Sunday Katherine Faulkner and Sara Smyth reported how the abortion industry has make a mockery of the requirement that “a number of conditions must be met before an abortion is approved, such as that ‘the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman.’”
Abortion requests are essentially never turned down, but the Daily Mail has found that one of the two major players in the abortion industry can’t be bothered with meeting even the bare minimal requirements. And this comes less than a year after a previous scandal at Marie Stopes.
Here’s the lead (and it only gets worse):
Women are being signed off to have abortions based on only a brief phone conversation with a call centre worker, the Mail can reveal.
Doctors at Marie Stopes, the second largest abortion provider in the country, are approving thousands of abortions a year for women they have never met.
Less than a year after an inspection by the healthcare watchdog found that many abortion approvals are based on only a one-line summary of what a woman tells a call centre worker who has no medical training, a Mail investigation revealed that the telephone discussions can be as short as 22 seconds.
Last year a scandal erupted when the health watchdog, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), raised concerns abortionists were signing off on abortions based solely on call-center conversations–and in “bulk.” One abortionist signed 26 consent forms in two minutes.
As the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children noted back in January
The Norwich center in Norfolk was forced to suspend all surgical abortions for two months after the initial inspection, and received perhaps the worst report. Inspectors found that “multiple surgical termination products” were being left in an open bin, “infection control audit results were poor,” and “staff were not trained to recognize and respond to a deteriorating patient.”
Some abortion services were suspended at various Marie Stopes locations. The temporary ban on performing abortions was lifted because Marie Stopes reassured regulators that improvements had been made at its clinics.
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But beyond the very brief phone interviews, there is another significant problem, according to Faulkner and Smyth:“In one case, our undercover reporter found that, following a telephone consultation, the official note of her reason for having the abortion was completely different from what she had said on the phone.”
For example, one reporter told a call center worker:
‘I’m just not in a position at the minute to have a child really, it’s just not the right time for me.’ But after being asked whether she agreed that it was not the right time ‘emotionally’ for her to have a child, she was told: ‘Yeah, yeah, under the Abortion Act, that would fall down as an emotional reason, so that’s absolutely fine.’
Pro-abortionists who defended Marie Stopes said that under the 1967 Abortion Law, abortionists are not legally required to meet the woman before agreeing to the abortion.
But “Department of Health guidance says it is ‘good practice,” Faulkner and Smyth report. “And doctors must be able to show they have signed off the abortion after forming an opinion ‘in good faith’ that the legal grounds for termination have been met.”
Faulkner’s and Smyth’s story includes representative phone conversations that were as superficial as they were brief. There was also a highly critical–indeed withering–critique of Marie Stopes’ practice by John Parsons, who formerly performed abortions there.
“We worked in an atmosphere of bullying and pressure,” he said. “It was nothing more than a conveyor belt service.
There was relentless pressure to perform abortions and cut costs.
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 at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
