All Nadine Dorries (and Frank Field, let’s not forget) suggested was a modest amendment to the Health & Social Care Bill: That women considering undergoing an abortion would have access to state-funded independent advice instead of being referred by the NHS to the abortion industry (an industry that is given £60 million to perform abortions). For this timid proposal Dorries was vilified (but not Frank Field) by the abortion lobby and she was disowned by her useless, amoral leader. Imagine, then, the outrage if someone had said that abortions should be outlawed because it is murder as contraception.
Like or not, that is exactly what abortion is.
Abortions are overwhelmingly sought because the baby is inconvenient or imperfect. The abortion of imperfect babies conveys a sinister hint of parent-as-eugenicist. Out of 189,574 abortions last year, 2,290 abortions were performed on babies with disabilities. The figure could well be higher as some women are likely to be reluctant to admit to aborting a baby because he or she is imperfect. Not just debilitating or difficult-to-manage disabilities, either, but cosmetic disabilities such as cleft-palates.
We are lied to by the abortion lobby that abortions can’t be abolished because this would unduly put women at risk from ectopic pregnancies. The number of ectopic pregnancies is minute. Between 1967 and 1990, the number of abortions performed to save the mother’s life tallies at a mere 151. This is 0.004% of all abortions. In the USA, only 4% of abortions are performed because of rape, incest or danger to the mother’s life.
Note that danger to the mother’s life is lumped in with other motives, such as rape and incest victimisation. We can only conclude then, that in the USA, abortions performed to save the mother’s life are less than 4%.
Abortion should be legal for that small percentage of imperilled mothers. It is senseless to permit two deaths. But abortion as contraception is murder. Abortion is the murder of a human being. There is no way around this, unless you are prepared to use deceptive language (it isn’t a baby but a “foetus”) or deceptive imagery (it isn’t a baby but a blob of jelly).
Why are we so accepting of the 24-week cut off point for abortions? Isn’t twenty-four weeks arbitrary and capricious? Does anyone really believe that in the twenty-third week it is jelly inside the womb, but in the twenty-fourth week it is suddenly, miraculously human? A matter of an arbitrarily chosen week determines whether we are puncturing to death a blob or a baby, it seems.
It is known that a baby can survive outside of the womb at 20 weeks. At nine weeks it is recognisably human. Yet people deceive themselves that because the baby is invisible to them it cannot be quite human. What difference does it make to the baby’s humanness if she is this side or that side of the intrauterinal wall?
It should not matter whether a human heart is the size of a pomegranate or the size of a poppy seed. It is a human heart. That is all that need inform our consciences. And conscience is the problem because, since the 1960s revolution, abortion has been a matter of conscience. Well, we live in a time where consciences barely function because we have been trained, since the ’60s revolution, to think only of ourselves. We are trained to love ourselves to the extent that we cannot love more the things which are of ourselves – babies.
I had a debate about abortion elsewhere and I was caricaturised as an evil dictator who likes to tell people what to do with their bodies. Fine, these are the smears you must expect when you say something unfashionable. But therein lie my opponents’ selfishness and stupidity. Selfishness because they believe that their bodies are objects that must subjugated to their desires (and to hell with everyone else); stupidity because the act of abortion involves someone else’s body. And not just someone else’s body but someone else’s life.
Of course, you can bank on David Cameron and his Conservative Party to back down from a fight that requires the stringiest of backbones. Cameron backed down sharply in response to the tumult over the Dorries and Field amendment. Journalist Christine Odone explained that a friend warned her that “Cameron’s biggest fear is that people will think he’s a moralising right-winger”. If that’s true, then Cameron’s fears are unfounded. He isn’t moral and he isn’t right-wing.
The upper ranks of the Tory Party is jam-packed with toffs and tin-heads who can’t form an intellectual resistance to left-wing ideology. Largely because they don’t want to. The Party is morally bankrupt and unthinking. Niki Molnar of the Conservative Women’s Group argues that abortions should not be delayed to avoid causing psychological problems to women. If the psychological problems of mothers who have abortions is her concern, perhaps Ms Molnar would care to admit that “delay” is irrelevant. Abortion causes mental distress whether it happens sooner or later. Strange, don’t you think, that Ms Molnar isn’t so concerned about the mental anguish caused by abortion that she is brave enough to call for them to be outlawed? No. Just get it over and done with quickly. Typical clueless Tory.
As for abortion practices to which the NHS refer patients: Of course they are going to lean on women to get abortions. It’s a sixty million pound industry and that is a very strong incentive to sway the expectant woman to have an abortion, especially acknowledging (the truism) that to work for an abortion clinic you are unlikely to have any ideological/ethical qualms about referring the woman for an abortion. Abortion is a business and businesses are not inherently moral. Are abortion clinics pro-choice or are the really just pro abortion? This is an important distinction alluded to by Olivia Jackson.
And do the feminists (the ones who rage about women being able to do what they want to their own bodies) not see that, in many cases, women will be pressurised not only by abortion clinics but also by non-committal fathers too? The right thing to do is to promote the married family so that there is a right time, within a structured and stable life, for husbands and wives to have babies. This means we must stop subsidising other types of relationships where participants in those relationships are itinerant and random. The types of relationship that perpetuate the bastard industry.
That is not to say that middle-class professional women do not have abortions. Many do because they are pressurised into having a career. Yet the root of the problem is the same: The destruction of the traditional married family owing to the changes of 1960s revolution.
There are curious times we live in. The liberal fashion is to be opposed to the execution of murderers but in favour of killing unborn babies and the elderly and infirm (via euthanasia). What a strange inverted world we occupy: One where the life of a hideously guilty man is worth more than that of the old and inconvenient or of the innocent baby – The baby who we are guiltless about puncturing to death with a needle.
Abortion is murder. It is overwhelmingly performed as an act of contraception. Murder as contraception.