Friday November 12, 2010
Britain Needs Informed Consent Laws to Lower Abortion Rates: Pro-Abortion MP
By Hilary White
LONDON, November 12, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Britain’s abortion rate could be lowered with the adoption of laws requiring women to be given full information as to the effects of abortion, a British MP said earlier this month. Nadine Dorries, the MP for Mid Bedfordshire, believes abortion should remain legal, but has campaigned consistently for more restrictions.
Dorries said in a debate in the House of Commons on November 2 that in Germany, France, Belgium, Finland, informed consent laws have made the “abortion procedure a far kinder one” for women.
“All those countries with good informed consent legislation had significantly lower than average daily abortion rates than the countries that do not have such informed consent legislation. Although a causal link is impossible to prove, these figures suggest that informed consent legislation might prove a good way of reducing Britain’s abortion figures.”
Britain’s abortion rate, one of the highest in Europe, slowed slightly last year, but still came close to 200,000, or approximately 572 per day.
“A woman has an assumed right to choose,” Dorries said. “However, she apparently has no right whatever to any information on which to make that choice.”
For any minor surgery, she continued, doctors are required to explain it to patients in detail. They are required to discuss possible pain, the dangers of general anaesthetic and post-operative progress is checked in follow-up appointments. “A woman who has an abortion has none of that.”
“Before the woman received the procedure, she might have felt coerced, pressurized or bullied into the abortion. To her, it might have been a life or the beginning of a life – depending on her perspective. She might have had a seed of doubt, but once she was on the conveyor belt to the clinic, she might have felt helpless and unable to step off.”
“Abortion in this country is an industry from which a small number of organisations and individuals make vast amounts of money. No sensible person would condone this.”
Anne Milton, a minister with the Department of Health, responded for the Government, saying that reducing the abortion rate is “an absolute priority” for the coalition government and that “advances” had been made to ensure women have “safe, legal abortions.”
Milton said that a White Paper report is scheduled to be issued later this year which will set out the Government’s position in more detail, and promised that the results of a review of the evidence surrounding mental health consequences of abortion will be published next year.
In the same debate, Andrew Selous, MP for South West Bedfordshire, pointed out that the cost of “counseling” for abortion is only covered by the public health service if the abortion goes ahead. The woman pays herself if she decides to allow her child to live.
Moreover, Dorries said, that only “minimal” counseling is available from NHS hospitals and private abortion facilities, and that in those places, there is a natural “conflict of interest.” If a woman is not interested in aborting her child, “no alternative counseling is provided to negate that option.”
Dorries decried the laxity of the existing restrictions that require the consent of two physicians. “Abortion clinics freely admit that consent forms pile up in their offices, waiting for the second signature, long after the event has taken place.”
But Andrew Stephenson, head of the pro-life group Abort 67, told LifeSiteNews.com that if he had Dorries in front of him, he would ask her, “Why do you want to restrict abortion? If abortion isn’t killing a small human being, then why have any restriction on it?”
Stephenson, with colleague Catherine Sloane, recently made headlines when they were arrested for showing large graphic images of abortion outside the Marie Stopes private abortion facility in Brighton as part of the Genocide Awareness Project movement.
He said, “You’ve got to ask yourself why. If there’s nothing wrong with abortion, then you can support it without any restriction. So why does Dorries want greater restrictions but not to outlaw it? But if it’s true that abortion kills an innocent human being, how can she support it?”
Stephenson and Sloane speak to women at Britain’s abortion facilities, and say that their experiences show that “girls don’t know the facts about abortion.”
“That’s perfectly true. Women have told us that they’ve been told by doctors that their baby was just a ‘mass of tissue’ like a kidney bean. So clearly something needs to be done, these women need more information.”
But there is a question of bias and motive, he said. “Whether I trust those people who would kill these women’s babies to give them genuinely accurate information is another question.”
“You’ve got to ask whether someone who is willing to kill a baby would give the sort of information required to help a woman make an informed decision.”
The work of Abort 67, which includes a website featuring graphic images and videos of abortions and aborted children, is to inform women of the grisly reality of what abortion really does to a child.
The women going into abortion facilities, Stephenson said, are often “in no fit state” to make such decisions. “They‘re often being dragged by their friends or families or boyfriends or husbands, and are not capable of understanding what is happening.”
Instead, Stephenson said, “Society as a whole needs a fuller information on this. We need to reach those who are pressuring girls to abort before the situation arises.”
The group aims to do something “much more broad” than giving information to “a girl sitting in a doctor’s surgery hearing a few stats and facts.”
“We do know that when girls see the reality of abortion up front, they change their minds. I would agree that in our experience that’s been the case many times.” This shows the need for a nation wide information campaign. “We need to see girls in schools being properly informed about what abortion is, before they get to the stage when they’re having to make this decision.
“If we’re serious about reducing abortion numbers, we need to be educating men and women from an early age about the truth of abortion. Only when the truth is known everywhere will we decrease those numbers.”
“We’ve seen it on a small scale and we know it would work on the larger scale.”