NEWS that abortions are now officially legal to the point, presumably, of a pregnancy being overdue and mum suddenly not feeling the love, should be etched for ever in the national record as a crime against humanity. Shame on us.
I don’t want to dive into the complexities of limited term abortions, pro-life/pro-choice arguments, the religious aspects, a woman’s rights, etc. For now I am simply horrified by the idea of a healthy, fully formed child being murdered – executed – by and with the explicit authority of the state.
At the risk of causing stomach-churning offence, can I inquire how they intend to go about it? Apparently 87 per cent of British abortions are carried out courtesy of simply ingesting a pill, commonly available online. And there you go, baby flushed down the loo! Why bother with contraception, eh? Take your chances and pop a kill pill, possibly alongside your Saturday night Ecstasy tab, hey girls? Shocking.
But a baby having spent nine months taking full human form, hours or minutes away from greedily suckling at its mother’s breast, a beautiful child with all the promise and love and hope a new life brings? Barbaric.
So, the murder. Details please. Is it a medic applying a deadly injection into the child, before inducing ‘mum’ into shelling a corpse? Where’s the Hippocratic Oath there, doc? Maybe just cut the dead baby out, if our vain not-a-mama wants a tummy tuck in the process? I mean, who wants a flabby belly hanging around when there’s nothing to show for it? Embarrassing or what?
I imagine the assassination has to be effected while the baby is in situ, yes? You couldn’t really hit it over the emerging head with a hammer, if mum has a change of mind before the maternity ward’s gas-and-air or epidural has kicked in.
And what about the body – because it is a body, don’t fool yourselves otherwise. Throw it in a bin? Shred it? Probably incinerate it, more like. I mean, nobody wants a permanent reminder of the unloved life lost, do they? Out of sight, out of mind, folks!
Inhuman, that’s what this is, however its legislative apologists want to dress it up. There is one specific community, however, where this toxic development may play handily into demographic family planning.
It would have been autumn 1997 and a regulation maternity unit scan for my wife, pregnant with our second child. All was well. By this time our baby-in-waiting was clearly developed well beyond being an inconveniently unwanted fertilised egg. It was a healthy, formed, identifiable human. My wife inquired about the sex of our baby as suggested by the scan and was told that the hospital couldn’t do that, ‘in case we’re mistaken’, I think the nurse muttered.
I asked – then demanded – to see the hospital trust chief executive, a man I knew courtesy of being editor-in-chief of half a dozen local newspapers at the time. He gave a few trite ‘explanations’ before I offered my own understanding of the situation.
His hospital served a large and exponentially expanding Muslim community. With male births being hugely preferred, there was a very realistic worry over the not uncommon tendency for female diagnoses not to reach full term. I can’t assert the truth or fiction of that, but I do know what a senior maternity unit nurse had told me regarding the root of the policy. The chief exec couldn’t possibly confirm any of that of course, but ensured we were duly able to plan for the arrival of our daughter.
My wife witnessed the special post-natal treatment reserved for this sanctified sect when she shared a room with a Muslim new mum who, strangely (to us) seemed to want nothing to do with her baby, leaving its care entirely to the nursing staff. I was just arriving at the appointed start to visiting time when I found half a dozen men already departing. They’d been visiting my wife’s neighbour out of visiting hours (they turned up whenever they wanted, without objection) and I found my wife in deep distress.
The group of men had sat silently around the adjacent bed until our little girl was handed to mum for feeding, at which point they all turned their chairs to gawp at an exposed white breast. Again, blind-eyed staff all around. It’s a good job I hadn’t turned up early otherwise there might have been a few A&E admissions.
Two-tier policing and politicking in modern Britain? It’s a popular current theme, but in reality it’s two-tier everything, folks, and it is far, far from being a novel submission to this medieval cult. But having said that and in light of this abhorrent legislation, it seems our enlightened Christian nation isn’t beyond its own medieval regressions . . .
