A BBC 5 radio programme has broadcast live from an abortion clinic, describing what happens to women when they go to a clinic and interviewing two women who have recently had an abortion, as well as the staff there. The whole abortion procedure is dressed up with a pleasant cloak of respectability.
The ‘treatment room’ is light, fresh and tastefully decorated, in order to create a relaxing, calming atmosphere. The medical director describes her work as a caring service: ‘We take great care to support women.’ The ‘treatment’ in question is described as the simple removal of ‘tissue’, or the extraction, or expelling, of the ‘contents of the uterus’.
This could describe a room in any doctor’s surgery or hospital clinic, except that this refers to an abortion clinic and therefore the ‘tissue’ in question is in reality a baby in the womb.
The BBC interviewer, Victoria Derbyshire, chats with women who are well spoken, calm, measured, positive, confident and (unsurprisingly) very pro-abortion. None (of course) have any regrets about either having a termination or doing them. Derbyshire several times describes the clinics as being airy, comfortable, with nicely painted blue and cream walls, reclining and suede-covered chairs, with the sun shining into the rooms. She wants to ’demystify’ the process, presumably to thus make it even more palatable and easy to go through with.
The programme is all about women: ‘We are not here to judge, we are here to support women’. ‘It’s her body and her decision.’ Her choice, her rights, her needs, her desires. The other lives involved – the baby and even the fathers – receive almost no mention. In order to justify the ‘process’, or the ‘treatment’, and make it feel more palatable and respectable for women, the baby is referred to, at various times, as the ‘contents of the uterus’, ‘the tissue’, ‘a bundle of cells’, ‘the pregnancy’ and, at best, ‘the fetus’. The baby in the womb is certainly not referred to by any women or staff as a baby. At one point Derbyshire asks the medical director if, after the ‘treatment’, any women ask to see ‘the contents of the uterus’. The answer is ‘only rarely’, because ‘it’ is only a mass of blood and tissue, not dissimilar to a period but a different colour.
This disturbing and distasteful programme was utterly one-sided. By broadcasting it, the BBC has effectively provided Marie Stopes and the well-funded abortion industry with a two hour advertisement for their ‘services’.
Not only does the unborn child have absolutely no voice or no focus at any point during the whole two hours, but there is no mention of the long-term effects of abortion on women, the very people this is focussed on and supposed to be ‘helping’. There is complete dismissal of any suggestion that a baby might feel any pain up to 23 weeks and 6 days, there is no mention of any of the physical risks of abortion and no mention of the risks of subsequent pre-term births.
The public should be able to hear a programme like this broadcast from an independent counselling clinic, such as those run by LIFE and Care Confidential. Then some of the real truth of abortion could be heard. The truth is that it often has a devastating effect on women, sometimes years later, as they try to work through the implications of what they have chosen to do, or felt pressured to choose to do. Most women eventually have to face up to the fact that the ‘content of the womb’ that was ‘expelled’ in the clinic was not simply ‘blood and tissue’ but in reality was a baby that was not allowed to live. Sadly, a programme such as this, in cahoots with the abortion clinics, deliberately and falsely hides this truth from women.
The clinics get the income from abortions but it is women who pay the price.
Josephine Quintavalle from the Pro-Life Alliance rightly reminded Derbyshire in a short follow-on debate for the programme that: ‘Women deserve better than abortion, and so do babies.’
If you would like to read more about the experiences of women before and after abortion follow this link to the Care Confidential website: People’s Stories Submitted to Care Confidential. It also includes responses from advisors to these women.