“I will do all government paperwork conscientiously” is not a clause in the Hippocratic Oath. Yet it is a significant aspect of an ethical doctor’s day-to-day work. Government red tape is an exasperating burden, but doctors have no special privileges before the law.
Politicians lose their jobs for falsifying their expenses. Accountants can be jailed for fudging audits. Scientists are stripped of their funding when they falsify data. Shouldn’t doctors feel obliged to follow the letter of the law, too – especially when lives are at stake?
Last week the London Telegraph revealed that doctors at many British abortion clinics were routinely falsifying their paperwork. The Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, was outraged and vowed to crack down on clinics which were operating outside the law.
“I was appalled. Because if it happens, it is pretty much people engaging in a culture of both ignoring the law and trying to give themselves the right to say that although Parliament may have said this, we believe in abortion on demand.”
In the wake of revelations in February, also in the Telegraph, that some doctors were routinely approving illegal sex-selective abortions, the government regulator, the Care Quality Commission, raided every clinic offering abortions. Of about 250 clinics, both government-run and private, 50 were found to have falsified paperwork. Although abortion is a common procedure in Britain, it still requires the approval of two doctors. The main offense uncovered by the raid was that doctors were pre-signing the consent forms in bulk.
Mr Lansley was also disturbed that patients were not receiving adequate counselling. He pointed out that this was not just a matter of pettifogging paperwork:
“There is the risk that women don’t get the appropriate level of pre-abortion support and counselling because, if your attitude is that, ‘You’ve arrived for an abortion and you should have one,’ well actually many women don’t get the degree of support they should…
“I completely understand the law doesn’t require the doctor to have met the woman concerned, but to pre-sign certificates when you don’t even know which woman it relates to and there hasn’t been an assessment, is completely contrary to the spirit and letter of the law.”
This seems like common sense, but the CEO of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the largest private abortion provider in the UK, Ann Furedi, was angered by the raids. She said that it was “absolutely wrong” for the CQC to abandon all of the important work on its agenda to persecute abortion clinics.
In fact, the sloppy paperwork seems to have been an open secret. In September 2007 a former medical director of the BPAS told a Parliamentary Committee that the paperwork was being done so badly, even illegally, that the two-doctor requirement should be abolished. Dr Vincent Argent wrote:
“The author has observed the following practices—some of these may be illegal and they need clarification: Signing batches of forms before patients are even seen for consultation; signing the forms with no knowledge of the particular patient and without reading the notes; signing forms without seeing or examining the patients; signing forms after the abortion has been performed; faxing the forms to other locations for signature; use of signature stamps without any consultation with the doctor.
“The HSA1 form is often considered to be just an administrative process where doctors make no attempt to form an opinion, in good faith, that the patient fulfils the grounds of section 1.”
Clearly these irregularities have been going on for years, ignored by practitioners and regulators alike. The outrage of the Health Secretary smacks of the mock indignation of Captain Renault in Casablanca – “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”
It was only a few weeks ago that a Telegraph sting uncovered another abortion scandal: that some doctors were aborting children on the basis of their sex. The Health Secretary thundered then that abortion clinics would be investigated.
You would have thought that the clinics would have tightened up their procedures in preparation for a raid. Obviously they didn’t. Were they so smug that they thought that abortion would always be exempt from public scrutiny?
Perhaps so. Abortion in the UK, and elsewhere, is protected by post-modern chivalry founded on the principle that women who support abortion are channelling Florence Nightingale. A columnist for the Guardian, Zoe Williams, defended the BPAS over the paperwork scandal and described it as “a not-for-profit organisation staffed by women (I hope they won’t be offended) for whom the term “do-gooder” was intended”.
This culture of deferential complacency has a familiar ring. It echoes observations made by the Pennsylvania Grand Jury which investigated the stomach-churning Gosnell abortion mill last year. It concluded that there had been “a complete regulatory collapse”. It said:
“Pennsylvania’s Department of Health has deliberately chosen not to enforce laws that should afford patients at abortion clinics the same safeguards and assurances of quality health care as patients of other medical service providers. Even nail salons in Pennsylvania are monitored more closely for client safety.”
Has there been a complete regulatory collapse in Britain, as well? It appears that doctors have ignored the law for years and regulators have deliberately chosen to ignore their arrogance. If the paperwork is not being done, what assurance do the government and the public have that far worse scandals – even by the standards of the law in England and Wales – are not happening? None at all.
More importantly, the doctors and the abortion clinics are throwing sands in the wheels of democracy. The abortion law was passed with promises by politicians that women who wanted an abortion would be protected by strict safeguards. Now it is clear that those safeguards are being treated as a joke.
The rule of law is vital in a democracy. Non-enforcement of the law by politicians and public servants out of loyalty to the higher ideology of abortion rights is profoundly anti-democratic.
Cross posted from Michael Cook at MercatorNet.
BPAS abortion clinic in London - Up to one in five abortion clinics is suspected of breaking the law
Latest news from the UK cross posted from The Daily Telegraph.
Up to one in five abortion clinics is suspected of breaking the law and faces a police inquiry following an official investigation ordered by the Health Secretary, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
The regulator conducted a series of unannounced raids on every clinic offering abortions this week and found that a “shocking” number may be breaking the law.
The Daily Telegraph understands that more than 250 private and NHS clinics were visited and more than 50 were “not in compliance” with the law or regulations. Doctors were regularly falsifying consent forms and patients were not receiving acceptable levels of advice and counselling in many clinics, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) discovered.
Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said he was “shocked” by the findings of the CQC’s audit and was preparing to report doctors and organisations to the police. Many clinics may be stripped of the licences that allow them to offer abortions.
Mr Lansley is understood to be preparing an urgent statement to Parliament on the scandal today.
He ordered the investigation into the clinics after this newspaper disclosed that several were offering illegal sex-selection terminations and falsifying paperwork.
He said yesterday that the regulator had found that a number of clinics may be acting beyond the “spirit and letter of the law”.
“I was appalled,” he said. “Because if it happens, it is pretty much people engaging in a culture of both ignoring the law and trying to give themselves the right to say that although Parliament may have said this, we believe in abortion on demand.”
He said it was not just a matter of enforcing the law. “There is the risk that women don’t get the appropriate level of pre-abortion support and counselling because, if your attitude is that, ‘You’ve arrived for an abortion and you should have one,’ well actually many women don’t get the degree of support they should,” said Mr Lansley.
The main problem identified by the CQC was that doctors were “pre-signing” consent forms.
The law requires the signatures of both the supervising consultant and a second professional who has either seen the patient or read the medical notes and the summary of a consultation.
During this week’s inspections, regulators are understood to have found piles of “pre-signed forms”.
The Health Secretary said: “I was rather shocked by the pre-signing of certificates. We’re talking about doctors who have professional responsibilities and it seems to me that you can’t satisfy your professional and ethical responsibilities [by pre-signing].
“I completely understand the law doesn’t require the doctor to have met the woman concerned, but to pre-sign certificates when you don’t even know which woman it relates to and there hasn’t been an assessment, is completely contrary to the spirit and letter of the law.”
He added that action would be taken within days. “We’re dealing with all this quickly,” Mr Lansley said. “If there is evidence of an offence we will give it directly to the police.”
The Health Secretary said pre-signing forms “constitutes a criminal offence” and could also lead to doctors being struck off by the General Medical Council.
Mr Lansley warned that so-called abortion on demand was not acceptable. “It’s not what Parliament intended and it’s not what the law provides for,” he said. “My job is to enforce the law.”
Last month, The Daily Telegraph disclosed how abortion clinics throughout Britain were illegally offering abortions on the basis of the sex of a foetus.
Over three weeks, four pregnant women, accompanied by undercover raids by the Care Quality Commission this week are seen as the first sign of the regulator’s new “tough” approach after sustained criticism.
The rigour of the commission, responsible for regulating abortion clinics, hospitals and care homes, has been repeatedly called into question since it was established in 2009.
Last month, the commission’s chief executive resigned after a Department of Health report criticised the quango.
Cynthia Bower stepped down from her £195,000-a-year post on the first day of The Daily Telegraph investigation into abortion clinics, which found that some doctors were offering terminations on the basis of gender and raised major concerns over the regulator.
The commission was established with the merger of three health care regulators.
The department’s report noted that the first three years “have been difficult” and staff morale was “relatively low”.
The commission has faced criticism virtually from the start. Seven months into its existence, Baroness Young, its chairman, resigned after Basildon Hospital in Essex was exposed for having filthy wards and a high death rate despite being rated as “good” by the regulator a month previously.
The watchdog also admitted that it had made an “unforgivable error of judgment” after failing to act on a whistle-blower’s “grave” concerns about the behaviour of staff at Winterbourne View, which was later exposed in secretly recorded footage shown on the BBC programme Panorama. In its report, the Department of Health said the commission faced “strategic difficulties” with delays having “seriously challenged public confidence in its role”.
The review had been scheduled for later this Parliament, but was brought forward following ministerial concerns.
A Whitehall source said ministers were assured that the commission’s house was in order, “but every time they opened a door, skeletons fell out”.
The level of potential abuse uncovered at abortion clinics this week is expected to lead to further searching questions over regulation in the past.
Cross posted from the Culture Vulture.
Earlier this week the UK Daily Mail ran an article by Jenny Stocks, a journalist who went undercover posing as a terrified pregnant women seeking counseling about her situation from three abortion providers and three pro-life pregnancy centres.
Her report exposes some serious issues in regards to the counseling being offered to women by abortion providers, where the counseling she experienced pushes women towards choosing abortion with statements that sow seeds of doubt and uncertainty, or which gloss over important information.
Just listen to what Stocks has to say about her experiences at one abortion provider…
“Nevertheless, the message seemed very much to be that abortion was the best option. ‘It goes against our very nature to have an abortion,’ she said. ‘But we do things every day that go against our very nature.’
This was followed by: ‘You want what you want . . . is it worth having a child because you don’t want to deal with a bit of guilt?’”
And at another abortion provider (a Marie Stopes centre)…
“On the phone, the operator repeatedly tried to book me in for a medical assessment, the first step to getting an abortion — despite me stressing that I hadn’t yet made up my mind.
I felt bulldozed into starting the termination process and had to insist on having counselling. In real life, a worried woman might have gone along with whatever she was told.”
These aren’t small and insignificant things, instead they place incredible pressure on vulnerable women in desperate situations and they have a profound impact on unduly influencing a person’s final decision in such matters.
The article also highlights the case of Catherine Stone, a 31 year old PR account manager in the UK.
Stone regrets her abortion, which she says happened because she received inferior counseling prior to making her decision to abort.
“I was in a stable relationship with my boyfriend, who’s still my partner, but we didn’t own our own house… I panicked about my career and the effect a baby would have on my life. It was, frankly, a knee-jerk reaction and one I bitterly regret” says Stone, who received counseling at Marie Stopes, but had such a bad experience there that she went on to have her abortion somewhere else.
She says that “the assumption by the counsellor was: “Of course you are having an abortion — this is your choice as a woman.” No one, at any point, said to me: ‘Are you sure about this?’ I wasn’t given the chance to think about what I was doing — it was quick, clinical, and I felt women were being herded towards the abortion table like cattle… I blanked out the possibility of keeping the baby — if I’d had the support of a counsellor I’m fairly sure that today I’d have a child.”
Tragically Catherine Stone was then left to deal with the experience of severe depression after having her abortion.
So, as far as abortion providers go, Jenny Stocks undercover investigations have revealed that the experience o Catherine Stone is not an isolated aberration, instead it clearly seems to a very worrying norm that is part and parcel of the type of pressure that women face in counseling sessions offered by abortion providers.
But what about the pro-life pregnancy centres, how did they measure up in this undercover investigation?
Well, it’s a mixed bag really, because on the one hand Jenny Stocks says that, out of all the counseling facilities she visited, the best counseling she received was from the Christian affiliated centre known as ‘Choices’.
Although, it’s a little hard to know what to make of this statement about the counseling she received from Choices: “Her only advice was that I made a decision soon, as I was already quite late on in the pregnancy.”
It’s hard to know whether the counselor did indeed phrase the statement in this way, because if she did then it would seem to be problematic, because the counselor would have been placing pressure on her to rush into a major life altering decision.
So on the one hand, Stocks says that her experience of the counseling offered at Choices was one which she considered to be balanced and which “had I really been pregnant, I would have considered keeping the baby, without feeling pressured to do so”, but unfortunately she says that her experiences at another two pro-life centres she visited were not as good.
At those other two visits Stocks says that she experienced the following…
a. arriving at one centre to discover it was a Christian organization, something which was not stated on its website anywhere
b. a counselor suggesting to her that having a baby would be a matter of keeping all that she’s already got while simply adding a ‘little one’ to all those other things in her life (which is obviously a very misleading oversimplification of what’s actually involved in having a child).
c. invasive counseling techniques which saw personal information gleamed about her family situation then used to try and emotively influence her decision making processes.
d. a counselor who didn’t seem to know important aspects of UK abortion law (either that or she mislead Stocks because she didn’t want to tell her what the gestational limit for abortion was).
e. being told that she needed to tell her boyfriend ‘tonight’ that she was pregnant
Now to be fair to these two pro-life pregnancy centres, I do think that Stocks has probably made more out of one or two things than is fair – for example, she lists ‘being warned about all the relationships that break up because of abortion’ as a negative act, but surely (as long as the presentation of this information is factually correct and not emotionally manipulative) such information isn’t out of place in a counseling session intended to explore all of the issues associated with abortion?
I also do think that Stocks is coming at this issue from the a priori assumption that the ethical nature of the act of abortion issue isn’t actually relevant here, but I’m not sure that this is a valid assumption (she certainly hasn’t shown in any logical way why the ethical issue is irrelevant, and only personal choice matters) – but that’s a cultural conditioning thing, and to respond to that requires a much bigger discussion than what we have space for here.
The one point that Stocks makes that I do think is fair is her point about one of these pro-life centres advertising itself as being ‘non-directive’, yet aspects of what she experienced there clearly weren’t non-directive at all.
The important challenge here for pro-life crisis pregnancy centres is to ensure that they are honest in their representations of themselves, and that in their haste to see an ethical outcome achieved, they don’t fall pray to the error of Consequentialism – the notion that the end justifies the means, in this case: ‘anything goes for the pro-life cause’.
Important virtues such as honesty and empathy mustn’t give way to manipulation and misrepresentation in order to secure a good outcome, for to do this is ultimately a failure to adhere to that which lies at the heart of our pro-life cause – love.
Ultimately we are not morally accountable for the free moral decisions of other people, only for the moral decisions that we make ourselves.
So if someone freely chooses abortion, that isn’t on us, and we must never fall prey to the trap of violating important moral principles, or to manipulating people into making their choices, because such acts are no longer acts of love, but of deception, and even if they do manage to secure a good outcome, the means we have used to get there in such an instance are not ethically good, and they are not acts of authentic love.
Ultimately, though, while Stocks’ investigation certainly raises some important challenges for pro-life pregnancy centres, there is little doubting that it has uncovered some very serious flaws in the currently accepted practice of having counseling carried out by abortion providers.
Pro-life pregnancy centers can fix the issues raised for them in this article by simple adjustments to their practice behaviors, however I’m not sure that this is good enough for abortion providers, because it would seem that the current practice lacks transparency, and leaves women vulnerable to pressures that are driven by the financial benefits gained by these abortion providers every time they convince a woman to choose abortion.
Cross posted from the Culture Vulture.
The UK Telegraph has just published an article about new abortion figures released which show that at least seven children were aborted last year simply because they had a cleft palate.
Other figures showed that at least one baby was aborted AFTER 24 weeks in the UK in 2005 because they had a cleft palate.
The fact that such a condition could even be considered a justification to abort a human being is truly frightening and really makes one wonder just how far the eugenic mentality has stretched to in the UK.
Presumably these babies were aborted because of the fact that they were considered unfit due to their physical imperfections.
This week, the UK radio show, Unbelieviable?, aired an episode on the topic “are there good reasons for abortion?”. The episode saw host, Justin Brierley, moderate a debate between New Zealand blogger Madeleine Flannagan and Wendy Savage, a representative of UK organisation Doctors for a Women’s Choice.
A range of topics related to the issue of abortion were raised which saw some interesting back and forth between Madeleine and Wendy.
Amidst the discussion as to what counts as a good reason for having an abortion, they got into post-viability abortions, whether a foetus is human, whether brain activity or lack of dependency on the mother should be the criteria for humanity, the use of terms like fetus, abortion for fetal abnormalities, abortion to save a woman’s life, the argument from backstreet abortion and so on. The episode provides a pretty good presentation of the alternative views in the debate.
You can listen to the Unbelievable? episode here:
Cross posted from the Culture Vulture.
Just over a year ago Tibet Truth, a human rights organization which focuses on the unjust treatment and human rights violations that take place in Tibet, China, etc, drew people’s attention to the fact that in April last year Marie Stopes UK had hosted Ms. Li Bin, Communist China’s Minister in charge of their National Population and Family Planning Commission as a guest of honor.
The National Population and Family Planning Commission oversees China’s one child and forced abortion policy, and all of the grave violations of human rights that are part of that programme (like the imprisonment and torture of people who speak out against the policy, or the destruction of the homes of women, and their families, who try and have more than the one child allowed by the Communist Chinese regime).
Several British MPs tabled a motion last year opposing Marie Stopes hosting Ms. Li Bin as a guest of honor, but even that failed to attract much mainstream media attention.
So is it just me, or can anybody else see a major conflict of interest that arises when a UK organization like Marie Stopes, which is supposedly committed to ‘freedom of choice’ and women’s rights, hosts the head of a programme which restricts the right of Chinese families to determine family size, and which inflicts forced abortion on Chinese women to enforce this?
And why wouldn’t there be more of a concern about this from the mainstream media?
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