Finland (LifeSiteNews) — Lawmakers in Finland have loosened abortion restrictions by allowing women to obtain an abortion upon request during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy.
By a large margin of 125-41, Finland’s Eduskunta legislature voted to approve changes to the Abortion Act in order to ease access to the lethal procedure, based on the requests of a Feminist Association citizens’ initiative.
“The citizens’ initiative’s priority is to abolish the need for women to have to justify terminating pregnancies of up to 12 weeks with financial or social arguments,” explained Euractiv in 2020, after the initiative had gathered the required 50,000 signatures needed to put its proposal before lawmakers.
Under long-standing Finnish abortion law, a woman can only obtain an abortion under certain conditions, such as if “livery and care of a child would place a considerable strain on her in view of the living conditions of the woman and her family and other circumstances.”
READ: California mother brings daughter saved by abortion reversal pill to 40 Days for Life rally
The changes to Finland’s Abortion Act will also allow women to obtain an abortion at the recommendation of only one doctor, as opposed to two, which is currently required under the law.
According to the Associated Press, Finland’s abortion law has been the strictest in the Nordic region.
The newly enacted changes to the Abortion Act had been supported by NGOs such as Amnesty, the Midwives’ Association, the Finnish League for Human Rights, the Family Federation, the Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and “several youth, women’s and political groups,” according to Euractiv.
The European news outlet also reported that the Christian Democrats are Finland’s only political alliance opposed to the loosened abortion requirements.
The updates to Finland’s abortion law are expected to take effect in early 2023.
Pro-abortion activists have recently attempted to bolster their justification of the killing of preborn babies with claims that five-week old embryos and even nine-week old embryos simply look like blobs of tissue, using pictures provided by abortionists.
However, in-utero film featured in the documentary “The Biology of Prenatal Development” shows that these abortionists have provided an incomplete picture. When a woman is six and a half weeks pregnant (four and a half weeks since fertilization), her baby, at an embryonic stage of development, already has a rapidly beating, blood-red heart.
By five weeks and six days after fertilization, embryos have already developed hand plates; and by seven weeks and four days from conception, their fingers are visibly separate.
Regardless of the physical appearance and developmental stage of preborn babies, they are endowed with unique DNA from the moment of conception, a blueprint for all of their physical characteristics and even their temperament, and rendering their unique human personhood a scientific fact.