Sunday, December 04, 2005

Front page where it should be - Official inquiry into the 50 babies that are born alive after botched NHS abortions AND 28 year old survivor of 7 month abortion speaks against abortion

It is commonplace for the killing of a child to be front page on newspapers and for politicians to state that it will never happen again, but in spite of the scandals surrounding botched abortions and reports that babies have been born alive in February and August, until Monday 28th November, no newspaper had given the babies that survive abortions front page coverage. Finally this week, the infanticide of babies, born alive following abortion, received serious attention in at least 2 newspapers, and this time it was not just description without action, but the promise of a serious inquiry into the issue, welcome both on democratic and human rights grounds. The Sunday Times and Daily Mail (front page) reports that there will be an investigation by the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health (CEMACH) into the fifty babies a year which are born alive after abortion.

The Confidential Inquiry is a hugely important step forward in treating this issue with the seriousness that it requires and addressing the awfulness of highly developed babies being killed by feticide, placed in intensive care with horrific injuries due to deliberate medical practice, or struggling to survive after being born alive. The survey of 31 babies born in northwest England between 1996 and 2001 following abortions after 18 weeks appeared in the August edition of the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and is commented on here. It revealed that babies were being born alive after abortions at 18 weeks, and are being left to die and struggling to breathe for up to 5 hours, raising concerns about the numbers of babies affected throughout the country. That was in August and still the practice of babies being aborted at late gestations continues without any democratic scrutiny.

It is disgraceful that to date, abortion agencies both NHS facilities, funded by the public and private facilities which should never be outside of the law, have been able to get away without any public scrutiny or accountability - quite literally getting away with infanticide. The report in the BJOG, despite being written by proabortion authors admitted that official guidelines are being ignored, including the midwives code of practice and BMA guidelines which state that the baby if born alive must receive medical care. It is not necessary to be a professor in obstetrics to agree with Professor Stuart Campbell, who pioneered the 4D ultrasound images of the baby at 12 and 14 weeks, that medicine that results in a baby born crying following an abortion at 19 weeks and is left to die or harmed by the brutality of the abortion procedure is the victim of "substandard medicine". It is difficult to see how it can be described as medicine at all.

The abortion agencies continue to obscure the barbaric nature of how abortions are carried out and how highly developed babies are during the second and third trimester. It is time that pro-abortion claims were interrogated properly by a sceptical media. They have been given a free ride for too long. The abortion groups are keen to stress that there are only small numbers of abortions at later gestations. However, as the Sunday Times points out, there were 7,432 abortions at 18 weeks or more last year. Hardly small. The public have a right to facts. The Sunday Times also points out that "70%-80% of babies in their 23rd or 24th week of gestation now survive long-term." Not for the first time it is pointed out Britain is out of step with Europe wiht the highest legal limit for terminations (24 weeks or up to birth on grounds of disability), compared to France and Germany which limit so-called “social” abortions to the 10th and 12th weeks.

Most of all debate on the issue of abortion should be grounded in facts, not pro-abortion euphemism and vagueness. Both the Sunday Times and Daily Mail reported that a 28 year old American woman is currently speaking in Irish universities and will be speaking in the UK about surviving an abortion. Her story urgently needs to be heard:

My name is Gianna Jessen. I am 19 years of age. I am originally from California, but now reside in Franklin, Tennessee. I am adopted. I have cerebral palsy. My biological mother was 17 years old and seven and one-half months pregnant when she made the decision to have a saline abortion. I am the person she aborted. I lived instead of died. Fortunately for me the abortionist was not in the clinic when I arrived alive, instead of dead, at 6:00 a.m. on the morning of April 6, 1977. I was early, my death was not expected to be seen until about 9 a.m., when he would probably be arriving for his office hours. I am sure I would not be here today if the abortionist would have been in the clinic as his job is to take life, not sustain it. Some have said I am a "botched abortion", a result of a job not well done.

...I have met other survivors of abortion. They are all thankful for life. Only a few months ago I met another saline abortion survivor. Her name is Sarah. She is two years old. Sarah also has cerebral palsy, but her diagnosis is not good. She is blind and has severe seizures. The abortionist, besides injecting the mother with saline, also injects the baby victims. Sarah was injected in the head. I saw the place on her head where this was done. When I speak, I speak not only for myself, but for the other survivors, like Sarah, and also for those who cannot yet speak ...

see Gianna Jessen's testimony given before the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on April 22, 1996. here

see also Telegraph 4th December Gianna Jessen was aborted at 7½ months. She survived. Astonishingly, she has forgiven her mother for trying to kill her.

an extract from the Sunday Telegraph interview:
..."at 17 months, Miss Jessen was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, caused by her brain being starved of oxygen during the termination. "The doctors said I was in a horrible state," she says. "They said I would never be able to lift up my head, but eventually I did. "Then they said I would never be able to sit up straight, but I sat up straight. Then they said I would never be able to walk, but by the age of three I was walking with a frame and leg braces." She pauses before adding: "I have a little bit of feistiness in me."
It is this "little bit of feistiness" that has enabled her to become a full-time disability rights and anti-abortion campaigner. Although she lives in Nashville, Tennessee, she travels the world to talk about her experience and, last year, ran her first marathon in seven-and-a-half hours. She is entered in the London Marathon next April for the Stars Organisation for Cerebral Palsy, a charity that raises funds with the help of celebrities, and hopes to better her time. "I'll be running furiously till then, trying out my brand new leg muscles," she says, with a laugh.

4 Comments:

Blogger Fiona said...

In response to Nick's comments posted on one of the cloning posts.

"Nick said...

Why do you think the Media is against the pro-life side of the argument?

Why was abortion made legal in the first place?

Why do people who are in favour of abortion have a monopoly on the Human Rights angle?

What do you think the main reasons are for women choosing abortion? If abortion was made illegal how would you solve the issues which lead women to make the abortion choice?

How do you react to the argument that if it was not legal that there would be 'back street' abortions. Also, would there be any occasion where abortion would be ok? (ie, if the child was concieved through rape or would be born a vegtable or threten the mother's health)."

Hi Nick, thanks for your comments. Journalists obviously hold a diversity of views on this issue, with some columnists - Polly Toynbee, Jackie Ashley, Zoe Williams in the Guardian taking a very strong proabortion position. The Guardian has had a succession of proabortion writers on their columns and has not had any prolife writer. This means that everyone who reads the Guardian is only given the abortion side of the argument. This in turn perpetuates the status quo, debate becomes lazy. The media may also avoid discussion of abortion in order to avoid upsetting readers. But if women are hurt by abortion all the more reason to stop it and obviously this overlooks the primary victim, which is the baby.

Legalised abortion was perceived to be in women's interests, but the feminist movement in the States was strongly opposed to abortion as they saw it as another example of the tyranny of the strong over the weak. The numbers of illegal abortions was massively exaggerated. I was recently at parliamentary meeting where the pro-abortion speaker was talking about her pride in being involved in helping women to have abortions before legalisation, and I asked her what she did to help women continue with the pregnancy and she simply didn't understand the question. The idea of helping women to her equalled termination but the idea that women. The idea that women were compelled to undergo risky invasive crude abortion procedures horrifies me, but the answer is to remove the source of the desperation through financial and emotional support.

I don't think that people who are in favour of abortions have any monopoly on human rights. I see abortion as an abuse of human rights - the child, the mother and anyone else associated with it.

Women abort for many reasons because of emotional and financial pressure, with a variety of coercion and choice. I don't think genuine choice exists in the vast majority of cases, not least because in order to choose abortion there has to be a valid option to continue with pregnancy, and because choice must involve factual information about abortion, which no one currently gives women. The teenage pregnancy strategy does not involve giving teenagers full information about abortion, which would certainly have a deterrent effect. Alive and Kicking (www.aliveandkickingcampaign.org) is calling for a massive reduction of abortions and much greater support for women to continue with pregnancy, as well as a charter of informed consent and a cooling off period between the diagnosis of pregnancy and abortion, which allows many women to change their mind. If the Government has smoking cessation targets then it could easily have a public health campaign on the much more urgent issue of abortion.

If people were given full information about abortion, and it was tackled like any other crime, then I do not see why many people would break the law and have a backstreet abortion. However if they did the methods would still exist for this to be carried out safely for the woman, even though abortion is never safe for the baby obviously and some people say it isn't safe for the woman either given the physical and psychological sequelae.

Logically the fact that abortion is wrong because it is killing a child must mean that it is always wrong, regardless of the circumstances of conception. In the case of rape, the woman needs as much support as possible but there is no reason why any woman would want an invasive and barbaric procedure following the trauma of rape. The baby is innocent of the crime and is also half the mother's child. Arguably the fact that rape is cited proves how horrific abortion is if it needs something as serious as rape to attempt to justify it. In the case of the baby being born disabled, the purpose of medicine is to treat and cure never to kill, and it is horrific that we allow such lethal discrimination against the disabled in this country, what happened to equality and human rights? In the case of the mother's life being in danger, everything should be done to save the child but if it is a side-effect of saving the mother's life than this is not abortion, this is emergency treatment of the mother. We ought really to concentrate on the 200,000 abortions that happen every year for social reasons and could be avoided by help and support for women, rather than the tiny handful of cases involving rape or a danger to the mother's life.

Thanks for posting. I would be interested in hearing your views.

11:30 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fiona,
I am also against abortion in a very strong way and I am a Christian singer/songwriter and I would like to send you a song I wrote that speaks out against abortion. If you would like to hear it send me an e-mail and I will MP3 it to you, or send me your address and I'll snail mail it to you.

monilutz@comcast.net
http://www.monilutz.com

thanks,
Moni

10:33 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fiona,
I am a Christian singer/songwriter from the USA and am very strongly against abortion. I have written a song that takes a stand agaisnt abortion and would like to send it to you via e-mail as an MP3 or by snail mail. If you are interested in hearing it, please email me at monilutz@comcast.net or check out my web site www.monilutz.com

thanks
Moni

10:40 AM  
Blogger Fiona said...

hi Moni. thanks for your message. I think it's great to get as many people as possible involved in defending life, whatever their religious belief, as it is about basic humanity.
You can email me on fiona at fionapinto dot com,
best wishes
Fiona

3:03 PM  

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