Baroness: “Lord Steel, would never have sanctioned gender abortions”
By Heidi Miller
Sex-selection abortions and gendercide are concepts that are usually equated with countries like China or India, not England. But sex-selective abortions are happening in the United Kingdom. Baroness Knight of Collingtree brought the matter to the attention of the House of Lords last Thursday:
“I have checked the Act a number of
times and all the amendments very carefully. There are no such words or
clarity in the whole lot of them. It would amaze me if there had been,
for none of us dreamed then that it would become possible to know the
sex of an unborn child. The noble Lord, Lord Steel [architect of the
1967 Abortion Act], would never have sanctioned gender abortions.
“Abortion law surely lacks clarity on
matters that need to be clear. Furthermore, it suffers from those who
play with words to the extent that it permits terminations that were
never intended to be legal.”
Baroness Knight also spoke of the frequency at which the Abortion Act is broken:
“The Abortion Act is four pages long
and contains only seven sections. At least four seem to be broken
regularly, yet it is impossible to get details of investigations into
this law-breaking or about any resulting prosecutions.”
Lord Gordon of Strathblane followed Baroness Knight, encouraging the House of Lords to find common ground on this issue:
“Discussion is polarised between
those who regard abortion as a form of retrospective birth control and
those on the other side who regard it as a form of anticipatory
infanticide—and never the two find common ground. I hope that today
might be an exception, because I think we are all united that abortion
for gender selection reasons is wrong—the question is what we do about
it.”
According to Lord Patten, Chancellor of the University of Oxford and chairman of the BBC trust:
“[A]llowing sex-selective abortion
would mean that the UK was sleep-walking into a full-blown eugenic
society, flying full into the face of humanity and the gift of life.
Gender-selective abortion, which is highly discriminatory against
females, is not prohibited by any Act or any other legislative
instrument…”
The question now remains as to what steps will be taken to ensure that gendercide is outlawed in the United Kingdom.Editor’s note. Heidi Miller is an attorney, specializing in litigation. This appeared at liveactionnews.org.
Source: NRLC News
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