UK doctor filmed admitting termination would be tantamount to ' female infanticide'.

Dear England,

Last week, it seems everyone flew into a tizzy because the Daily Telegraph reported that abortion facilities are allowing women to abort their children if the child is the “wrong” sex. The papers and politicians are saying that “sex-selective abortion” is illegal and “morally wrong.” In fact, the whole business has upset everyone so much that Scotland Yard is now involved.

But I’m afraid I just don’t understand, England. Hadn’t you accepted the pro-abortion/pro-choice movement’s assertion that abortion is always a “choice”? Isn’t it supposed to be entirely a “private decision between the woman and her doctor”? I had understood that you believe it is the choice alone that makes the act “moral.”

Yet here we have one of your elected officials, Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, saying yesterday, “sex-selective abortion is morally wrong” because it isn’t on the list of accepted reasons. Today he wrote in The Telegraph: “Carrying out an abortion on the grounds of gender alone is in my view morally repugnant.”

Do I understand this correctly? It is morally wrong to end the life of someone specifically because she is a girl (and I am going to assume specifically because he is a boy, though this seems never to be mentioned out loud), but you can certainly end the life of a girl because you just don’t really feel like having a child at all, of either sex.

Or, as the law currently permits, if the girl is suspected of being “severely handicapped”? To clarify: it is morally wrong to end the life of a child specifically because she is female, but not morally wrong to end the life of a child who has Down’s Syndrome, but just happens to be female at the same time?

Or, to look at it another way, is it “morally repugnant,” as Mr. Lansley says, to end the life of a female child who, let us say, has a cleft palate or a club foot and who also happens to be female if your reason is not a loathing of these malformations but a loathing of female children? This seems odd because the end result is precisely the same.

Quite honestly, I’m surprised you are bothered. It seemed that after a few troubled nights, the whole issue of ending the life of children for their disabilities really just didn’t seem to worry you too much at all. 

I would like to ask you, and Mr. Lansley, according to what criteria is an act “morally wrong”? What possible difference does it make to anyone what reason is given on the forms? Isn’t a key point of legalised abortion to allow our society to end the life of children? If we have established that it is ever morally permissible to do this, does it matter so very much why they want to?

England, you say that someone seeking an abortion has to have, or, more to the point, has to say they have the correct, socially approved reasons. But if you have accepted that we as a society can end the life of a child, that in some cases doing so is even a meritorious act, how does this ending of a life ever become “morally repugnant” if it is carried out for some reason that does not make the current list of socially approved reasons?

Also, could I ask, England, who makes this list? Where does it come from? How are the criteria for “morally repugnant” and illegal and the criteria for legal and meritorious decided?

It does not come from your 1000 years of jurisprudence that established civil liberties based on the person’s inherent rights as a human being.

It also doesn’t come from traditional medical ethics, the ancient cornerstone of which is “Do no harm” to anyone, mother or child, and which specifies that no doctor can give a woman a “pessary to cause an abortion”.

At the risk of sounding impertinent, where did you get the idea that abortion is acceptable under any circumstances? Who exactly told you that? And why did you suddenly decide to believe it?

If the list of morally acceptable reasons for abortion is derived from the general social opinion, what happens if and when that changes? What if you, England, become a society dominated by a culture that thinks it is not the least bit “morally repugnant” to end the life of girls before or after birth? Will this mean that it is still, objectively, immoral? Will you change the law?

Once you have established that as a society we can end the life of an unborn child, what is the point of maintaining any sort of pretense of moral outrage if the reason for ending the life is not to your personal liking or the personal liking of your politicians? Why retain these oddly archaic, traditional moral restrictions at all? Does this not seem somewhat contradictory?

The Telegraph’s video clip of a Dr. Raj approving an abortion more or less sums up the whole problem. The pregnant women explains that she wants to terminate her pregnancy because she had discovered she was having a girl but her and her partner “don’t want a girl”. What happens next?

“Is that the reason?” Dr Raj asks. “That’s not fair. It’s like female infanticide isn’t it?”

The solution becomes clear in an instant: simply put down some other reason. Dr. Raj says, “I’ll put too young for pregnancy, yeah?” Because everyone in that room, including Dr. Raj and the Telegraph reporter, knows that these regulations are a farce.

Clearly the difficulty you are having, England, is that while abortion comes with a moral framework that admits of no exceptions, politicians know that that framework is not accepted by the general public, which views it as “morally repugnant.” The trick so far to keeping everything going has been to never talk about it. Never let anyone ask the kind of questions I have asked above.

The Telegraph tells us, “The disclosures are likely to lead to growing pressure for pregnant women considering an abortion to be offered independent counseling”. And Mr. Lansley has said that there will be a “public consultation” on the issue. So it seems we are, at last, going to talk about it.

This seems like a good idea, but I wonder if we are clear about what, exactly, the consultation will ask the public? Mr. Lansley seems to think it is only a matter of women receiving “independent counseling”. “All women seeking an abortion should have the opportunity, if they so choose, to discuss at length and in detail with a professional their decision and the impact it may have,” he says.

But who is going to do this counseling? The staff and operators of these abortion “charities” whose six-figure salaries depend upon abortion?

I wonder, England, are you really ready to face the results of such a public discussion? You are clearly ill at ease with things as they are now.

Either way, it seems that we are getting close to the time when you will have to decide which way you want to go. These contradictions can no longer be hidden, even from those most determined to ignore rampaging elephants.

Dearest England, if there is to be a consultation, I do hope that you will not hesitate to ask the questions I have asked above.

Should you ever feel the need to revert back to your previous moral convictions – that something that is “morally wrong” is so because of the nature of the act itself, and not because it contravenes the strictures of some ephemeral social trend – please be assured of my whole-hearted support, and that of many more who love you tenderly.

Cross posted from LifeSiteNews with additional reporting from ProLife NZ.