As the Duchess of Cambridge emerges from the ordeal of pregnancy sickness and displays her discreet bump to the world’s press, it is sobering to remember that more than one in five women becoming pregnant in the UK choose not to give birth, but to have an abortion. The latest available figures show that only 1 per cent of these are carried out because the baby would be born handicapped. Another 98 per cent are on the grounds that the continuation of the pregnancy would carry a risk to the woman’s mental health.
All told, more than 190,000 abortions are carried out each year on this basis – yet Professor Clare Gerada, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, has admitted that the risk is not objectively tested. “What we have is what the woman tells us,” she says. “It isn’t for me to judge her or be moralistic. It’s for me to explore potential other options but to take her at face value.” In other words, if a woman asks for an abortion, she will almost certainly get one.
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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • Marriage & Family • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology
Posted February 5, 2013 at 4:39 am
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2. Laura R. wrote:
The latest available figures show that only 1 per cent of these are carried out because the baby would be born handicapped. Another 98 per cent are on the grounds that the continuation of the pregnancy would carry a risk to the woman’s mental health. The terrible irony is that, if much of what I have read on the subject is correct, it is having the abortion that carries a great risk to a woman’s mental health, in the form of long-term depression, guilt, etc. February 5, 6:16 pm | [comment link] |
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That this is obvious is beyond denial. It is also true in this country. Abortion may be had for the convenience of the mother, for any reason she chooses. But what do you expect in a society obsessed with free love and free sex. Indeed when the “right” to contraception now appears to require others do pay for it and subsidize other peoples sexual escapades.
February 5, 7:20 am | [comment link]