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PAGE TITLE: The Mail on Sunday
ARTICLE
TITLE:
Safe, legal, and very common - the Abortion Epidemic
AUTHOR: Peter Hitchens
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Peter
Jonathan Hitchens (born 28 October
1951) is an award-winning British columnist and author, noted for his
traditionalist conservative stance. He has published five books, including The
Abolition of Britain, A Brief History of Crime, The Broken Compass: How British
Politics Lost its Way and most recently The Rage Against God. Hitchens writes
for Britain's The Mail on Sunday newspaper. A former resident correspondent in
Moscow and Washington, Hitchens continues to work as an occasional foreign
reporter, and appears frequently in the British broadcast media. He is the
younger brother of the writer Christopher Hitchens.
DATE: Monday 22 October
2007
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|
Peter
Hitchens
|
22 October 2007 5:50 PM
Safe, legal, and very common - the Abortion Epidemic
Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday
Hardly
anyone says or thinks that abortion is a good thing in itself. Even its
supporters accept that this is a nasty procedure. Hillary Clinton, for
instance, has frequently declared that it should be "safe, legal - and
...(pause for effect) rare".
But
that is the problem. If it is safe and legal, it is likely to become more
common. And so it has, with the figures in Britain creeping ever closer
to the 200,000 a year mark despite (or in my view because of) sex education,
readily-available contraceptives and the increasing ease of obtaining the
morning-after pill. One of the problems of this argument is that there is
no reliable information about the true state of affairs before abortion was
legalised in Britain 40 years ago. Whose word would you trust on this matter?
Pro-abortion propagandists talk of tens of thousands of bloody back-street
abortions, and in the 1960s estimated these at anywhere up to 250,000 a year.
How did they know?
At
the time that the Bill was going through Parliament, the Royal College of
Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said of such claims:'These are without any
secure factual foundation of which we are aware. The incidence of criminal
abortion varies widely from city to city . . . in the experience of many
gynaecologists working outside large cosmopolitan cities the occurrence is
relatively uncommon and, when it does happen, the abortion is more often
induced by the woman herself than by some other person.' The report said there
were, on average, 50 fatal abortion attempts each year in England and Wales. Of
these, 30 followed criminal acts. 'If there are 100,000 criminal (including
self-induced) abortions being performed annually this means that they are
attended by a mortality rate of only 0.3 per 1,000. The risks of criminal
abortion are established to be high, so the known number of deaths suggests
that the total number of such cases must be considerably less than that
alleged.' The only alternative explanation for the lack of fatalities, said the
doctors, was that criminal abortions in back streets must be safer than legal
ones in hospitals. Not very likely, is it?
What
is also forgotten is that abortion was effectively legal before 1967, in
certain closely defined circumstances, thanks to the 1938 case of Dr Aleck
Bourne, who performed an abortion on a 14-year-old girl who had been gang-raped
by a group of soldiers just off Whitehall (The details are all coldly recorded.
The crime was real and can be checked in the archives. The men were caught,
tried and imprisoned at hard labour, which was what you got in those days for
doing something seriously wrong. The girl's identity has never been revealed,
but she was referred to in court as 'Nellie').
Dr
Bourne then reported himself to the authorities, a courageous act of principle
typical of a man who was always true to himself (as we shall see). He faced a
possible life sentence under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. His
clever barrister, Roland Oliver, advised him to plead not guilty on the grounds
that, while he admitted that he had done the operation, he did not accept that
it was unlawful. His argument was simple. The 14-year-old girl would have gone
out of her mind if compelled to carry the baby to full term. His plea had powerful
support. The then King's personal physician, Lord Horder, went into the witness
box to support him.
The
Judge, Mr Justice McNaghten, as good as told the jury to acquit Dr Bourne,
telling them that he had in effect saved the girl's life. He said 'If the
doctor is of opinion, on reasonable grounds and with adequate knowledge, that
the probable consequences of the pregnancy will be to make the woman a physical
and mental wreck, the jury are quite entitled to take the view that the doctor,
who under these circumstances, and in that honest belief, operates, is
operating for the purpose of preserving the life of the mother.' The jury took
40 minutes to bring in a not guilty verdict and the BMA conference, then in
session at Plymouth, erupted in cheers when they heard the news.
The
success of this defence meant that any doctor, from then on, could cite Dr
Bourne's case if he acted in the same way. He might face prosecution, might
even be tried - but if he could show that there was a serious justification for
what he did, he would not be convicted. This allowed abortions in such
serious cases, but did not create a free-for-all of the kind that exists now.
Listen
to the Royal College again, discussing the operation of the law 40 years ago.
They said: 'We are unaware of any case in which a gynaecologist has refused to
terminate pregnancy, when he considered it to be indicated on medical grounds,
for fear of legal consequences.' And those who believe legal abortion on the
NHS was introduced only after David Steel's 1967 Abortion Act will be surprised
to learn that there were 1,600 legal ' therapeutic' abortions in NHS hospitals
as early as 1958, and 2,800 in 1962. The doctors accepted these figures were an
underestimate, not least because other abortions were taking place in private
hospitals. Some researchers believe there were as many as 21,400 legal
abortions in England and Wales in 1966, when Steel's Bill was still fighting
its way through Parliament, eventually becoming law the following year.
The
Royal College said at the time (April 1966) that its members were quite content
with the state of affairs which followed Bourne's trial. They felt they need
not fear prosecution provided they honestly believed they were acting to save
the mother's sanity – a very flexible rule. (No doubt the Royal College is now
firmly in the hands of the Cultural Revolution, and supports existing policies.
I quote its evidence given 41 years ago to show that this was not always so,
and may not always remain so). So you might think that Dr Bourne would have
been a fervent supporter of David Steel's 1966 Bill to legalise abortion, if
doctors agreed that carrying the baby to term could endanger the mother's
health.
Absolutely
not. During the controversy which led to the current law coming into force in
1967, he declared: 'Abortion on demand would be a calamity for womanhood.' He
also predicted 'the greatest holocaust in history' if the Bill were passed. He
was not to know of the other holocaust which would begin in German-occupied
Poland two years later, but in terms of numbers, the killing of unborn babies
in Britain and the USA since the relaxation of abortion laws in the 1960s must
be approaching several million in total. He can hardly be accused of
overstating the danger. He revealed that many women had come to him asking him
to abort their babies in the years following his trial, thinking he would
oblige because of his generous and brave treatment of 'Nellie'. To their
surprise, he had refused, and did not regret having done so. He recalled: 'I
have never known a woman who, when the baby was born, was not overjoyed that I
had not killed it.'
Personally,
I think the Roman Catholic Church (to which I do not belong) is right to point
out that we have no objective, indisputable scientific way of judging at what
point a fertilised egg becomes human, and that we must therefore
grant it human nature from the beginning. This is a troubling fact, and
if we take Christian morality seriously, it makes it impossible wilfully and
consciously to destroy such a life. That is a matter for each of us and
his or her conscience.
In
drafting the law of a country which is not officially Roman Catholic, and
barely Christian, the problem is different. Provided we leave doctors and
nurses wholly free to abide by their consciences, we are compelled in practice
to be utilitarian. I might like a total prohibition on abortion, but I have to
recognise that we would need a vast moral reconstruction to make such a ban -
with all its implications - effective. People would have to want to keep sex
within marriage, for a start. There are, in our society, going to be unwanted
pregnancies. There are going to be abortions, legal or not. What should the law
say about them, if we really wish to discourage abortion and make it less
likely?
I
appreciate the grave problems of rape victims being made to carry unwanted
babies to term, for after all, it was these dangers that led the courageous Dr
Bourne to perform his famous abortion in 1938. But would the birth and
subsequent adoption of such a baby by one of the many parents unable to
conceive, be so much worse than the surgical extinction of life, an
operation so grisly that it is about the only form of violence which is never
shown on TV or in the movies? I do not think this is an easy
question to answer, and mistrust glib replies from either side.
In
any case, it is a momentous decision for any individual to take, which may look
very different years later (when it is irrevocable) from the way it looked at
the time (when it wasn't irrevocable). In 1990s America, a brilliant if cruel
TV commercial portrayed a woman in a park, holding out her arms to catch a
child running towards her, only for the child to vanish at the last second, a
devastating portrayal of the late realisation what has been lost.
And
let us not assume that all cases are of equal urgency. A rather small
number of abortions are performed on women who have been raped. In most cases,
the sexual intercourse involved was voluntary and intentional. Yet sexual
intercourse is known to lead to pregnancy. Should we really encourage people to
believe that the two things are so separate that they are licensed to
extinguish any life which results from sex that was meant to be recreational,
and turned out to be reproductive? This is of course the effect of propaganda
portraying sex with condoms as 'safe’. Safe from what, exactly? It also has
something to do with the growing fear of parenthood in prosperous,
self-indulgent societies such as ours - the reverse of the attitude in peasant
civilisations, where children represent security in old age.
There
is more than one way in which an unborn baby can endanger the mental health,
and general wellbeing, of its mother. One of them is by not being born, and
being subsequently regretted forever. (See above). I do not believe
the current position, where the supposed danger to the mother's mental health
is given as the reason for huge numbers of abortions, many of them second or
third terminations performed on the same woman, takes the question seriously
enough.
My
feeling is that we made the wrong reform in 1967. The propaganda film 'Vera
Drake' which seeks to make a heroine out of a back-street abortionist in 1950s
Britain, does strike one heavy blow. It portrays the deep divide between rich
and poor. A well-off 'respectable' family could easily persuade a private
doctor to sign the necessary papers and arrange an abortion in cleanliness and
relative comfort. Whereas the poor must either bear their unwanted children, or
put their lives in the hands of untrained, unqualified quacks that could quite
easily kill them.
Perhaps,
if the NHS had been permitted and encouraged to offer the same limited service
as private doctors then provided, more readily and universally, free of charge,
but under close restrictions which could land the doctor in court if he took
them too laxly, the inequality could have been removed without signalling to
the world that abortion would henceforth be a backstop form of contraception.
For this is, without doubt, what it has become.
Perhaps
it was just that the change coincided with the campaigns of the Kinsey-inspired
sex maniacs across the Western world to bring 'sex education' into schools, put
it on TV, and distribute contraceptives to the unmarried on the assumption that
they were all having sex outside wedlock. These campaigns, supposedly aimed at
reducing unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, have in fact been
followed by increases in both. Does that mean that sex education increases unwanted
pregnancy and STDs? I am not sure. But I am quite certain that what we have now
is unendurably bad, and must be reformed. And if people such as Hillary Clinton
mean it when they say that they want abortion to be rare, then they must accept
that it is now much too legal.
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