Have we reached a tipping point on abortion?

Two events last week suggest that its ideological appeal is tottering and about to fall.
Michael Cook
Tuesday, 28 February 2012

From 1917 to 1991, for more than 80 years, Russia was ruled by an ideology of oppression which paraded as a beacon of liberation. But within 40 years, the masquerade was over, even if the misery remained. Novels like Dr Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; or Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman, exposed the Soviet system for what it was, a band of thuggish mummified old toads lying to the people they governed. It took another 30 years to shake off Communism despots, but their ideology was dead.

Events last week suggest that we may have reached a similar tipping point with the ideology of abortion. Nearly 40 years ago Roe v. Wade pressed a button which opened the floodgates in the US and around the world. Now legalised abortion is being exposed as a republic of lies governed by another band of toads.

First of all, it emerged in the British press last week that UK abortion clinics are falsifying paperwork so that they can carry out their clients’ requests for sex-selective terminations. Undercover reporters for the London Telegraph accompanied pregnant women and taped doctors arranging an abortion after an unequivocal request to abort a child because it was of the wrong sex.

The reporters visited nine clinics; at three of them they were able to obtain sex-selective abortions. At the Calthorpe Clinic in Birmingham, one of the oldest in Britain, a doctor was initially reluctant.

“It’s like female infanticide isn’t it?” he said. But the pregnant woman suggested that he record a different reason for the termination. “That’s right, yeah, because it’s not a good reason anytime,” he replied. “I’ll put too young for pregnancy, yeah?” The patient agreed and the doctor continued, “It’s common in the Third World to have a female infanticide.” the rest