A report issued this week reveals that there has been a slight decrease in the number of abortions performed in Britain. The total number which took place in 2009 was 189,100 down from 195,296 in 2008. The fall is obviously good news, as far as it goes, and has been welcomed by the Department of Health, however, it has to be acknowledged that even the reduced figure is the equivalent of the population of Portsmouth, or three times the number killed in the bombing of Hiroshima. Irrespective of the tiny drop, in the two year period between January 2008 and December 2009 the number of lives eradicated amounted to just a few thousand short of the total population of Bristol.
Just over 3,800 of the procedures performed last year were on girls under the age of 16, however, the huge majority, over 185,00 were performed on adult woman. Some will have been the victims of rape, others will have been emergencies, where the woman's life was at risk, and in just over 2,000 of the cases, the child, had it lived, would have been disabled. However, as is always the case, these types of abortions, which are always held up as examples to justify why legalised abortion is so essential, will have accounted for a small minority of the total.
By a significant majority most abortions carried out last year, as in every year, will have fallen into the category which can reasonably be described as killing for convenience where the child is unplanned, unwanted or likely to cause a complication in the mother's life.
It is odd that this is allowed to happen in a society as child-centric as ours where so many people's lives are ruled by the well being of their children, and live in daily terror of a significantly exaggerated fear of paedophiles. However, we have somehow managed to separate children from foetuses in our mind, as if they are different creatures, rather than the same being who has merely moved from one environment to another. The pro-choice lobby, it seems have successfully managed to convince people that if you can't yet see a human being, it is a disposable commodity, and that a foetus, no matter how fully formed is not really a child.
We live in a society where a woman's right to choose, or in some instances, to change her mind, is considered of greater importance than the lives of hundreds of thousands of children.
Worse than that, in a troubling number of cases it does not appear to matter how many times a woman may wish to exercise her right of choice. As I have stated here before, for most of these women the abortion is the second choice, given that she had already had the choice not to have unprotected sex. However, beyond that the report reveals a quite disturbing statistic. Almost 3,700 of the women who had abortions in Britain last year have had at least four terminations. In fact 48 of them have had seven or more abortions.
Surely it defies credibility that all these women been raped four or more times (even if you believe that rape justifies terminating a healthy child for the sins of its father) or that they have been unlucky enough to face so many life threatening medical emergencies when they happen to be pregnant.
Certainly some will have had reoccurring complications and others will for genetic reasons will have produced disabled foetuses, but surely these will have been a minority
For whatever their reasons, thousands of women in this country appear to have chosen to repeatedly terminate the lives of their unborn children.
How can that be justified?
It is hard to escape the suspicion that a minimum of 15,000 children fell victim to serial killers in 2009, and, as this happened in the health service, we as tax payers aided and abetted in those killings.
