Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Late Term Abortion


 

Women 37 and 38 weeks pregnant are aborted in Great Britain, Department of Health reports



By Dave Andrusko
preemie55Back in February we re-printed a chilling column written by the irreplaceable Dr. Peter Saunders: “66 babies born alive after abortion in one year in Britain raise questions for parliamentarians.”
Dr. Saunders based his commentary on a story which had appeared in The Daily Mail. The newspaper found (based on data found in the “Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health 2007 Perinatal Mortality report”) that in just one year—2005—66 babies survived abortions performed in England and Whales and were left to die.
“Sixteen babies who survived abortion were born after 22 weeks in the womb or later in the pregnancy,” the Daily Mail reported.


I thought of that awful truth when I read a story that ran in Sunday’s Daily Express: “SHOCKED MPs have called for a change to Britain’s ‘medieval and cruel’ abortion laws after a termination was carried out on a baby only days before it was due to be born.”
In 2013 there were 190 abortions beyond what is ostensibly the limit—24 weeks—in 2013. But according to Caroline Wheeler of The Daily Express, “Department of Health figures show that last year a further three abortions were carried out on mothers who were 38 weeks pregnant and two more on women 37 weeks into pregnancy.”
How can that be?
British law has a sweeping loophole: abortions are allowed after 24 weeks if there is “substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped” (the notorious “Ground E”). Disability is flexibly defined and its usage very much under-reported.

We have followed this story for years, as it rises and falls under public scrutiny.
A little over a year ago, a headline in The Daily Telegraph read , “Cleft lip abortions ’10 times as common as reported’: More than 10 times as many abortions take place for cleft lip than are recorded in Department of Health statistics, according to European researchers.” The numbers are staggering—both in quantity and the reasons these unborn babies were killed.
According to Eurocat, “which was set up to
register
congenital abnormalities across 23 countries,” 157 babies were aborted for cleft lip and palate in England and Wales between 2006 and 2010. What figure does the Department of Health record? “Only 14,” according to the Telegraph’s medical correspondent, Stephen Adams. Wheeler wrote that
“Last year a parliamentary commission called for change in the law after hearing rules even allowed abortions at 40 weeks on grounds of disability.
“It learned that abortions can be carried out on babies with a cleft lip or club foot, conditions that can be rectified after birth. One doctor reported that on some occasions a wrong diagnosis had been given and the dead foetus was found to have no disability.
“So far there has been no official Government response to the report.”
Wheeler quoted Labour MP Rob Flello who said, “We have a Jekyll and Hyde approach to disability. One the one hand the entire country can be united in praise of paralympians. On the other we can permit the abortion of children at nine months simply for the ‘crime’ of having a disability.”
He added, unnecessarily one would hope, “This law desperately needs some sanity.”
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Source: NRLC News

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