LONDON, February 16, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Killing children by abortion is “extremely gratifying” according to a leading UK abortionist. Dr. Patricia Lohr told an audience of abortion advocates meeting in London in September that she could never have fully understood or agreed with the abortionist philosophy until she actually started committing abortions herself.
Lohr said that abortion is “self-evidently” moral and explained that she began to conduct 2nd trimester surgical abortions during her training as a physician. She said that she performs abortions “as early as possible and as late as necessary” and that she was unapologetic about being “pro-choice, pro-child and pro-abortion.”
Dr. Lohr, the medical director of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), one of the UK’s busiest abortion organizations, said that all medical practitioners should be willing to refer for abortions, even if they would not conduct the practice themselves for moral reasons.
“It’s crucial for abortionists to talk about abortion as a good thing,” she said, speaking of her personal enthusiasm for the abortionist ideology since encountering it first in New York as a teenager and later as the founder of a “pro-choice” group in medical school.
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In her talk, Dr. Lohr accused pro-life activists in the Operation Rescue movement of “violence” when they tried to shut down abortion facilities in New York in the 1980s, while Lohr acted as an abortion “escort” at 19.
In medical school, “abortion took on new dimensions” for her as “an issue of medical education.”
“Providing abortions to me at that time was self-evidently moral, particularly when we were told by older doctors about the ‘old days’ when abortion was illegal. [About] wards full of septic women, injured women, dead women. Legality and rights became evident to me as necessary but not sufficient.
“For me, my thinking about being pro-choice evolved. I could only be committed to pro-choice by performing abortions,” she said.
The comments became public after a report was published last week on the internet by a pair of pro-life advocates, Daniel Blackman and Paul Smeaton, who work with the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.
“It is horrifying,” Blackman, who attended the public meeting, told LifeSiteNews.com. “An abortionist’s desperate act of rationalisation of an unspeakable evil.”
Blackman, who published his report of the event on SPUC’s youth blog, “Why I am Pro-Life,” wrote that for a meeting advertised as public, it was difficult to find. Despite expectations of a large crowd, he said, “there were no more than about forty five people, including the speakers.”
“Most attendees were older women, and clearly people already working in the abortion industry in one way or another.”
“This ‘public’ meeting had more of the feel of a closed, private meeting and in reality this was little more than the abortion lobby speaking about and to itself,” Blackman said.
“The abortion lobby have good reason for wanting to keep these sorts of meetings as small, internal affairs. It is in these sorts of environments in which their true face and their radical anti-life agenda is revealed.”
The meeting was organized by the abortion industry lobby group Voice for Choice, a consortium of organizations dedicated to loosening Britain’s abortion law to allow abortion on demand and the expansion of abortion training in medical schools, as well as forcing legalization on Northern Ireland.
Dr. Lohr, who has pressed for making abortion training mandatory for all medical students, is a long-time abortionist and dedicated agitator for restriction-free, legal abortion, paid for by the state. In July last year as medical director of BPAS, she reiterated her demand that all medical students be required to participate in abortion.
She was responding to a report in the July 2011 Journal of Medical Ethics that said almost half of the 733 medical students polled believe doctors should be allowed to refuse “to perform any procedure to which they object on moral, cultural or religious grounds, such as prescribing contraception or treating someone who is drunk or high on drugs.”
Almost a third would refuse to commit an abortion on a disabled child after 24 weeks gestation; a quarter would do abortions for failed contraception before 24 weeks and one fifth would refuse to abort a child conceived by rape, according to the report’s author, Dr. Sophie Strickland.
Lohr deplored this situation, saying that “abortion services” could be “threatened” in the future because of those “who object to abortion in principle and who would refuse to carry out the procedure.”
In a media release, Dr. Lohr said, “It’s extremely important that abortion is included in the medical school curriculum.”
“Abortion is the most commonly performed gynaecological procedure in the country. Regardless of whether a doctor specialises in this area or not, they will during their career come across many women facing an unintended pregnancy and considering abortion,” she said.
The groups represented at the Voice for Choice meeting included the Abortion Rights, Alliance for Choice Northern Ireland, Antenatal Results and Choices (ARC), BPAS, the sex-education group Brook, Doctors for a Woman’s Choice on Abortion, Education for Choice, Family Planning Association (FPA) that is an affiliate of International Planned Parenthood, Marie Stopes International, Pro-Choice Forum, and Reproductive Health Matters.