A headline in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, indicating the insane world we inhabit, read: “Abortion is safer than having a baby, say doctors.” Reading on, incredulous, I learn: “The draft guidance from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists is for all doctors, nurses and counsellors advising women contemplating terminations. Its first recommendation on ‘what women need to know’ instructs professionals: ‘Women should be advised that abortion is generally safer than continuing a pregnancy to term.’ The guidance also says that women who are deciding whether to have an abortion must be told that most do not suffer any psychological harm.”
Abortion can only be “safer” than giving birth by the deadly logic that death cuts out the risk of living. Of course it does; but to follow it through as our most authoritative and prestigious medical college recommends is simply to worship at the altar of the god Moloch. Are we no more civilised than the ancient Carthaginians who, according to the Roman senator Cato, were abhorrent because they sacrificed their babies to this bloodthirsty deity?
Again, the assurance that “most” women who have abortions do not suffer psychological harm is mendacious. Research shows that depression, alcoholism, suicidal tendencies and self-harm surface, often years later, and blight the lives of women who have attempted to suppress the guilt of what they have done. A Catholic psychiatrist who treats women suffering from PASD (post-abortion stress disorder) once told me that although he did not have figures to prove it, he was certain that all women who have had abortions experience psychological trauma at some stage because the self-inflicted wound to the female psyche is too fundamental to be ignored.
Apparently the draft guidance was drawn up by 18 senior gynaecologists, nurses and abortion providers (my italics). I do not suggest that brown envelopes passed hands but abortion is big business; the market depends on a large and steady supply of victims. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.
The once-notorious abortion provider, Dr Bernard Nathanson, died recently. The man who personally performed 5,000 abortions, took responsibility overall for 75,000 abortions, paid for the abortion of a pregnant girlfriend and himself performed an abortion on another girlfriend, admitted that paying for the first abortion “served as my introduction to the satanic world of abortion”. Nathanson’s is an extraordinary conversion story; turning against his infamous trade, he made two films: The Silent Scream in 1985 and Eclipse of Reason, showing a late-term abortion, in 1987. They can be seen in horrifying detail on YouTube but not on major TV networks. As the late actor Charlton Heston observes in his introduction to the latter film, the media has not done its job: to inform the public about the facts of abortion. (Can you imagine an actor of similar status in this country publicly outing him or herself as pro-life?)
According to pro-life colleagues, Nathanson, who was baptised a Catholic in 1996, “underwent huge amounts of fasting” in reparation for his past. Perhaps we need to do the same, in recognition of what we have left undone that we could have done to change the public mind on this silent holocaust.
Another thought comes to mind as I watch the news about Libya: we preach the benefits of democracy to North African countries run by corrupt, self-serving tyrants, relieved that we live in such a green and pleasant land. Yet we have denied the right, not just to vote but to life itself, to millions of unborn children since the Abortion Act of 1967, children who will never have the chance to grow up to argue the merits of one political system over another or to experience life in this green and pleasant land.
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