Pro Life Campaign - Abortion - Questions and Answers

ABORTION COMMON QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

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www.prolifecampaign.ie info@prolifecampaign.ie

Pro Life Campaign Ireland @prolifecampaign

09/02/2015 12:06

Q:

Q:

Do you believe life begins at conception?

But 4,000 women travel from Ireland to Britain every year for abortion. Are we not just exporting the problem?

A: Yes. This is not a question of belief - it is a scientific fact. Each one of us started life as an embryo. When the father’s sperm fuses with the mother’s egg, a human life begins. At the moment of conception a new, unique and genetically complete human being comes into existence.

From that moment on the new human being develops and grows. Although very tiny, this new human being is not just a potential life – it is already a human being with potential: • At conception, a baby’s sex is decided, a boy or a girl.

• 18-21 days, after conception the baby’s heart is beating.

• At 8 weeks, everything to be found in a fullygrown person is formed.

• By 12 weeks, fingerprints and fingernails appear; the baby’s lips can open and close.

• At 16 weeks, the baby reacts to sound, sucks, swallows and yawns.

• At 18 weeks, many mothers feel the baby’s movements. Pushing with feet and head, the baby exercises the developing muscles. The baby now sucks his/her thumb.

• At 20 weeks, the baby sleeps and wakes like a born baby.

• With advances in medical care, babies born as early as 21 weeks can survive and thrive.

A: The value of life is what’s at stake in this debate.

The sad experience is that once laws permitting abortion are introduced, they diminish the society’s respect for the inherent value of every human life, born or unborn. Every country has to honestly address issues related to the right to life. There is an unceasing challenge for Government and society at large to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment for expectant mothers and their unborn children.

We cannot shy away from the implications of what legal abortion would involve and the brutal reality of abortion, legal up to birth, in countries like Britain and elsewhere.

The law is an educator. It helps shape society’s values and social norms. In the first year after the passage of the 1967 Abortion Act in Britain, 1 in 40 pregnancies were aborted. Within only five years it was 1 in 7. In 2013 the total number of abortions in England and Wales was 185,331.

Simply because something is legal in another country does not mean that we should blindly follow suit. In Britain, abortion is legal up to birth where the child has a disability such as Down’s Syndrome. It is up to us here in Ireland to decide our own laws. We can learn from the mistakes of a pro-abortion culture like Britain.

• At 30-40 weeks, if left undisturbed, the baby grows stronger until it is time to be born.

For years people were misled into thinking that the unborn baby was just a ‘clump of cells’. The amazing advances in ultrasound technology illuminate the truth that the unborn child is a human being. In 1967, when the abortion law was introduced in Britain, politicians could have pleaded ignorance to the humanity of the unborn. In 2015, we don’t have this excuse.

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Q: But isn’t abortion first and foremost about a woman’s right to choose what is best for her, and not what society imposes?

A: There are many situations in life where our choices are limited, if that choice could harm the life of another person. The rhetoric of ‘choice’ in the abortion debate not only harms a life but it ends one. Many women who’ve had abortions say they had it because they felt that they had ‘no choice.’ Every child is wanted by someone.

Steve Jobs, Andrea Bocelli, Jamie Foxx and Nelson Mandela are just some of the people that would not exist if their mothers had chosen abortion over adoption.

Q: So if a woman is raped, you still think she shouldn’t be allowed to have an abortion?

A: Abortion is put forward, even taken for granted, as a ‘solution’ to the most difficult situations.

But this approach also ignores the fact that it involves the taking of an innocent unborn life and the exposure of the women to emotional hurt and possible psychological harm. The reality is that our willingness to offer social support is the single most important factor influencing a better psychological outcome for women in crisis pregnancy.

If what seems impossible initially has a better long-term outcome for both the woman and her unborn baby, then we owe it to all concerned to have adequate supports in place to cope with these situations. Abortion is often the easy solution for everybody except the woman and her unborn child.

There are very few peer reviewed studies on pregnancy following sexual assault but a study

by Sandra Mahkorn 1 showed that there is a better social and personal outcome for women who chose to continue a pregnancy, despite harrowing initial circumstances. Two recent Finnish studies also show a better outcome for women who continue their pregnancy compared to women who opt for abortion. The landmark Roe v Wade decision, which legalised abortion in the United States, is a very clear example of how abortion advocates uses emotive cases simply to promote abortion. Ms Norma Mc Corvey (Jane Roe from Roe v. Wade) admits she was exploited by pro-abortionists at the time and now campaigns publicly against abortion.

There are increasing numbers of women joining the pro-life movement offering contrasting testimonies to those of the pro-abortion lobby.

Some represent women hurt by abortion (See www.womenhurt.ie) and others include people like American woman Pam Stenzel who was herself conceived as a result of rape but cherishes the gift of life and believes she has the same right to be alive as anybody else.

Punishing the rapist not the child A recent report said that just 7% of rape cases resulted in convictions. An analysis of rape sentencing in Irish courts showed that the average sentence handed down was just 5-7 years.

If we are to be truly concerned about protecting women we would seek stronger sentences for rapists and real justice for those who are victims of rape. Rape is an unimaginable and horrendous crime –however we do not suggest ending a life to rectify any other crime. Why do so in the case of rape? We also have to ask ourselves: whose baby is she carrying? It is not just the rapist’s baby. She is also carrying her baby. Recently I heard a story of a woman who was giving a pro-life talk and the issue of rape and pregnancy came up. A young boy put his hand up and said: “My sister was born after my mum was raped. I love my sister, she is my best friend, and she deserves to be alive.”

1 Mahkorn S: ‘Pregnancy and Sexual Assault’. The Psychological Aspects of Abortion, Mall and Watts, 1979

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Q: What about the case where the baby has a life-limiting condition and may not survive outside the womb?

A: It is unjust to end a person’s life because that person is terminally ill. Sadly to date, the media has only presented one side of this story to the public. When people are given an opportunity to hear the stories of parents from groups like One Day More, we will see a huge shift away from seeing abortion as the answer in situations where the baby has a terminal illness or as some people say, a “fatal foetal abnormality”.

A woman recently told her story about her child who lived for 17 minutes. In that time she named her baby boy who was loved for every minute of his life. She held him, kissed his face, baptised him and later she buried him and grieved for him. She said those 17 minutes were some of the most precious she had ever had and she would remember her son and could now grieve properly.

The parents in One Day More work in solidarity to cherish the lives of their terminally ill children for the short time they are alive.

Where abortion is made legal in these circumstances, it soon becomes the only option.

For example, in Britain, if parents receive a poor pre-natal diagnosis they are handed an NHS booklet which details what is involved in the abortion procedure.

See www.onedaymore.ie Some babies diagnosed prenatally with terminal illness will live only for a few minutes, hours, or days. Others are misdiagnosed and survive.

We have seen this happen time and again, doctors don’t always get it right. We must really ask ourselves what is the truly compassionate response in this situation.

Perinatal Hospice Care: Families should first of all be informed about perinatal hospice care and be offered contact details of parents who have had similar experiences so that they can lean on and support one another.

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A Culture of Care Once we concede that a child with a terminal illness can have their life ended prematurely, this premise will soon open the door as it has in other countries to aborting babies with varying degrees of disability. We have seen this with Down’s Syndrome in the UK where 92% of babies with this particular learning disability are aborted. The figures are similar for babies diagnosed with Spina Bifida – not because they are the most severe types of disability, but simply because they CAN detect them. It is scary to think that as medicine advances and more learning disabilities can be detected, abortion will be encouraged more and more. We need to lobby for perinatal hospice services in Ireland rather than abortion in situations where the baby has a terminal illness.

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Q:

Q:

But aren’t you just imposing your religious beliefs on women?

Why are you opposed to the law introduced in 2013?

A:

A:

The Pro Life Campaign is a non-denominational organisation which regards the right to life as the first and most basic human right of all. Without it, all other rights are meaningless.

Despite what the Taoiseach and others claimed, the new law is life-ending, not life-saving. The Government brought forward this law in the full knowledge that abortion is not a treatment for suicidal feelings and ignored all the peerreviewed evidence 2 showing that abortion has adverse mental health consequences for women. The Government did a very good job in packaging its proposal and we accept many people are still unaware that a law has just been introduced that permits abortion up to birth without a shred of medical evidence that it will save women’s lives.

You do not have to be from any particular faith tradition to agree that human life should be protected and that intentionally ending the life of another human being is not right.

Some of the world’s best-known self-professed atheists have also declared their support for the pro-life position, eg Christopher Hitchens.

2 David M Fergusson et al.: "Abortion and mental health disorders: evidence from a 30-year longitudinal study" The British Journal of Psychiatry pp. 444-451 (2008) Gissler et al.: "The European Journal of Public Health, 15(5): 459-463, Injury deaths, suicides and homicides associated with pregnancy in Finland.

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Q:

Q:

Don’t opinion polls show that the majority of Irish people support abortion?

In rare cases doesn’t a suicidal woman need abortion to save her life?

A:

A:

Opinion polls that make the distinction clear between life-saving treatments in pregnancy and induced abortion (that targets the baby) elicit completely different responses to polls that regularly appear in newspapers like The Irish Times. Questions in polls that present abortion as a treatment for suicidal intent are obviously going to show support for abortion. But such polls are misleading as it is a medical fact that abortion is not a treatment for suicidal feelings.

To get an accurate gauge of public opinion, it is essential to critically analyse the methodology used in each poll.

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No, actually, this is not the case. Where a woman has an underlying mental health illness, abortion is not the answer and could well be counterproductive for a woman’s mental health. It is not medical treatment. Where there is no underlying mental illness, it’s not a medical situation at all.

Psychiatrists just happen to be the ones asked to certify a woman’s eligibility for abortion. They can ask questions to determine how suicidal the woman is, they can suggest alternatives, but they have no way of knowing whether the woman will or will not commit suicide or whether the abortion will or will not affect the decision. Psychiatrists may decide on the basis of educated guesswork, pro-choice ideology or maybe just sanction the abortion as the best bet against being sued. Whatever they do, the Minister for Health has no way of policing it.

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Q: What about the tragedy of Savita Halappanavar?

A: The media framed the story surrounding the tragic death of Savita as a death caused by the absence of legal abortion. As is clear from the recommendations of the Coroner’s Inquest, the exhaustive investigation of the sequence of events that led up to her death established that the actual cause of her death was infection with a virulent anti-biotic resistant strain of E Coli compounded by a series of systems failures that delayed the realisation by the medical team of the gravity of the risk to her life, and the timely implementation of the appropriate responses to it.

It is no exaggeration to say that RTÉ followed the line taken by the Irish Times, in effect channelling the public distress and concern at the death of Savita so that it reinforced the Government’s insistence that legislation for abortion in line with the X case ruling was necessary, by supporting the opinion that had such legislation been in place she would not have died. That view was not supported by the evidence uncovered at the inquest.

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Published January 2015

Suite 60, Clifton House, Lower Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin 2 01 6629275

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www.prolifecampaign.ie info@prolifecampaign.ie

Pro Life Campaign Ireland @prolifecampaign

09/02/2015 12:06