Scottish Catholic Observer

Bishop Joseph Devine of Motherwell has said ‘horrifying’ evidence that babies are being aborted on the basis of gender illustrates the moral vacuity of the main Westminster political parties.

Media reports last week revealed that clinics across England are illegally offering to abort foetuses on the basis of gender. West Midlands Police have said they will investigate alleged abuses at Calthorpe Clinic in Edgbaston, Birmingham. One doctor at that clinic was secretly filmed offering to help a woman who said she wanted to terminate her pregnancy because the baby was a girl.

“It is like female infanticide isn’t it?” Dr Raj Mohan said before agreeing to conduct the procedure.

On demand

Bishop Devine said that this new evidence confirmed that ‘abortion “on demand” is in fact routine’ and decried the lack of moral leadership on the issue from Westminster politicians.

“Finally, we have independent and irrefutable proof of criminal behaviour prevalent in the abortion industry,” he said. “There have been wholesale and shocking failures in the regulation of abortion centres and these disclosures confirm our worst fears of the ease with which some women can arrange infanticide ‘on demand.”’

The bishop went on to say the shocking revelations were merely the latest example of the abortion lobby extending its reach within the UK.

“Surely only a zealot would be complacent about the huge number of abortions being carried out in the UK—miserably identified now as Europe’s abortion abattoir—with well over 200,000 abortions taking place every year—600 unborn babies aborted daily, the equivalent of 30 classrooms of children destroyed by abortion,” he said. “How could any decent person not want to reduce this frightening carnage of innocent babies in what should only be a procedure of last resort?”

The bishop said that those in the ‘dark, depressing, uneasy world of the abortion industry’ were working to ensure more and more abortions took place.

“No one dare suggest any sensible and healthy revision to the current regulations,” he said. “They want all debate shut down. As far as they are concerned  ‘a woman’s right to choose’ should be confined to choosing abortion. And so the killing continues on an industrial scale.”

Call to politicians

The bishop said that Westminster must now ‘demand’ that the ‘government introduce comprehensive arrangements for women to receive professional and independent counselling before an abortion is performed.’

Prompted by the gender-based abortion revelations, Conservative MP Nadine Dorris has called for a reform of the 1967 Abortion Act calling it ‘a badly drafted piece of legislation’ while Nirj Deva, Conservative MEP for the South East of England has asked the UK government to carry out a monthly audit of all abortions that receive funding from the British taxpayer.

However, Bishop Devine said Catholics ‘can have no faith or trust in the leadership of any of the three main parties in Westminster’ and referred to David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Milliband as ‘three straws in the wind.’

The bishop said Mr Cameron was guilty of ‘moral cowardice,’ dismissed the Liberal Democrats as ‘lamentable’ and said the previous Labour Government was 13 years of a ‘shocking onslaught of anti-Christian, anti-family legislation.’

Pro-life reaction

Sr Roseann Reddy, who works with pregnant young women via the Glasgow-based Cardinal Winning Pro-Life Initiative, said that the reactions to gender-based terminations demonstrated the UK’s profoundly mistaken and skewed approach to abortion.

“[The UK says] it is OK to tell a doctor that you want an abortion because your child is disabled with for example Down’s syndrome but wholly unacceptable, and dare I say it, wrong, to want an abortion because an unborn child is female!” she said, before adding that the reasons for having an abortion were irrelevant to the child.

“It seems that those in the media believe that only some grounds are acceptable or moral to seek an abortion and others are just too repugnant. For the unborn child, it matters not.”

The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) said that sex-selective abortion is the result of easy abortion access. “This investigation confirms the reality of eugenics in modern British medicine, in which some innocent human beings are deemed too inconvenient to be allowed to live,” Anthony Ozimic, SPUC’s communications manager, said. “Sex-selective abortion is an inevitable consequence of easy access to abortion… The government needs to cut its ties to private abortion providers and to abortion rights organisations.”

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