Failure to prosecute doctors for sex selection abortions in the UK causes outrage

We reported last week on the failure of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in the UK to prosecute abortionists who broke the law by carrying out sex selection abortions. Dr Peter Saunders in a new article says, ‘if the CPS won’t do its job then concerned citizens will step in. The CPS was giving the message that people wanting sex-selective abortions should come to Britain and that if the law is not upheld it will be increasingly flouted by unscrupulous people.’

Dr Saunders article ‘Outrage over failure to prosecute doctors for sex selection abortions reaches new heights’, is reprinted below. 

It has not been an easy two weeks for Keir Starmer (pictured), the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

When it emerged on 4 September that the Crown Prosecution Service, which he heads, would not be bringing charges against two doctors who had been caught authorising abortions purely on grounds of gender, the outrage was immediate.

Within hours the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said that sex selection abortions were ‘completely unacceptable’ and called for the Attorney General Dominic Grieve to seek an ‘urgent clarification’ about the decision.

The following day Lord Macdonald, the former DPP, described the decision as ‘very dubious’ and amounted to letting doctors ‘avoid criminal action’ because of their professional status - undermining the basic principle that ‘everyone is equal under the law’.

The CPS then made the situation worse by arguing that it was down to doctors to ‘interpret the law’ and that they had ‘wide discretion’ to assess whether a termination is legal or not. Although there was enough evidence to bring a prosecution it was not in the public interest to do so, they claimed. The matter was more appropriately a matter for the General Medical Council (GMC).

This led the GMC to distance itself from the CPS’s decision, insisting that, as a professional regulator, it should not be seen as a ‘substitute’ for the criminal justice system and is not there to ‘punish doctors’.

Emily Thornberry, Labour shadow attorney general, then wrote to the DPP to request an urgent review of the decision. She cut right to the heart of the issues at stake (full text here):

‘The GMC is a regulator and cannot bring criminal proceedings. The provisions of the Abortion Act 1967 are crystal clear. The conduct of abortions for reasons not stated in that Act is a criminal offence, not just a regulatory one. To decide not prosecute because a regulator can hear the matter instead is to disapply the law and undermine the will of Parliament.’

David Burrowes, a Tory member of the all-party parliamentary Pro-Life Group, then raised the issue in the Commons. He said: ‘There is urgent need for a statement to clarify whether the restrictions on choice in the Abortion Act are now meaningless.’

This led to the Prime Minister expressing concern in response to a parliamentary question from Tory MP Nadine Dorries.

Mr Cameron praised The Daily Telegraph for highlighting ‘this important case’ and said it was ‘absolutely right’ that the doctors could face ‘professional’ consequences.

This weekend 50 MPs supported the Health Secretary’s call for the matter to be urgently investigated.

In a letter to the Daily Telegraph they called the decision a ‘step back in the fight for gender equality’ and accused the DPP of usurping parliament’s role:

‘The decision by the CPS could lead to the conclusion that gender-specific abortion is merely a matter of professional misconduct rather than illegal. This is clearly unconstitutional as it is for Parliament to legislate to change the law, and it has occurred without recourse to Parliament. Safeguards in the 1967 Abortion Act need to be properly applied and enforced. Doctors are not above the law and the General Medical Council cannot be a substitute for the courts.’

Other critics have accused the DPP of ‘double standards’ over abortion laws and operating a policy ‘worthy of Alice in Wonderland’.

Last Friday the Christian Legal Centre said it was preparing for a private prosecution against the two doctors.

‘We are preparing for a private prosecution or judicial review, but we may do both,’ said chief executive Andrea Williams. ‘We will not let the matter go.’

I was asked to comment and said to the Telegraph that if the CPS won’t do its job then concerned citizens will step in. The CPS was giving the message that people wanting sex-selective abortions should come to Britain and that if the law is not upheld it will be increasingly flouted by unscrupulous people.

By failing to act the DPP has signalled that Britain is open for business as far as sex selection abortions are concerned.

I can’t ever recall any issue related to abortion uniting those across the political spectrum in the way this has done. It has brought prolife activists and prochoice feminist factions together in an extraordinary way resulting in Keir Starmer attracting the wrath of all sides.

Now all the heat is on the DPP to explain fully why he has not upheld the will of parliament. We are all waiting.

UK Crown Prosecution Service double standards on abortion prosecutions

Sex selection abortion is common in India and China but this phenomenon also exists in western countries including the UK. We reported in early 2012 on a Daily Telegraph article relating to two sting operations, which had established that female feticide is also practiced in UK abortion clinics.  We reported at the time that Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary had passed a dossier of the alleged malpractice at the clinics in question to the police and the General Medical Council.

The Telegraph reported last week, under the banner "Gender abortions: criminal charges not in 'public interest' says CPS", that despite the overwhelming evidence the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have decided not to take action and that it would not be in the public interest to do so.

This decision clearly shows that there is a double standard in the implementation of the law in the UK when it comes to abortion.

Paul Tully of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC)  in a statement said,

The announcement by the Crown Prosecution Service that it is not going to charge doctors for offering ‘sex-selection’ abortion smacks of a politically influenced decision.

There is little appetite in the pro-life movement for vindictive prosecution of doctors or others who kill babies, but we should expect the rule of law to be upheld, fairly and justly.

Dr Peter Saunders, chief executive of the Christian Medical Fellowship, who was among those who complained to police, said: “We seem to have a situation where, at the whim of the CPS, procedures that are clearly laid out in the Abortion Act can be completely disregarded by doctors and the NHS.

“That seems to put doctors above the law and raises questions about the CPS upholding the will of Parliament.

“We seem to have doctors being allowed to reinterpret the law with apparent impunity — it is quite extraordinary.”

On the other hand the CPS is very quick to take criminal proceedings against pro-life demonstrators as has been reported  by the Telegraph on Monday Sept 9th

Potentially high levels of criminal activity in UK abortion clinics

The Daily Telegraph has continued its campaign in relation to abortion clinics with additional articles on March 22nd and 23^rd see previous my BLOGS February 24th and March 15th

The Telegraph reported in an article on March 22nd that one in five abortion clinics in the UK is suspected of breaking the law and faces a police inquiry following an official investigation ordered by the Health Secretary.

The regulator  according to the report 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 they report is understood to be preparing an urgent statement to Parliament on the scandal.

In a further article on March 23rd the Telegraph reports :

Most clinics were visited by the much-maligned Care Quality Commission (CQC) once every few years and a culture of “abortions on demand” appeared to have been introduced by some doctors.

However, this culture seems to have been brought to an end when Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, who was shocked by what he read in this newspaper, ordered the regulator into action. Enforcement officers from the watchdog visited every clinic in Britain and their findings are raising serious concern at the highest levels of government.

Today’s disclosures about the potentially high levels of criminal activity in abortion clinics came several months after this newspaper was tipped off that some doctors were illicitly offering sex-selective abortions. Paperwork was allegedly being forged.

Earlier this year, four pregnant women of different ethnic backgrounds, accompanied by undercover reporters, travelled around the country to appointments at abortion clinics.

At each organisation, the pregnant woman explained that she wanted an abortion because of the gender of the foetus. Some clinics refused to help her, saying it was illegal to arrange an abortion for this reason. Others were willing to help.

UK Doctor suspended following sex selection abortion sting

We reported last month on the issue of UK doctors turning a blind eye to sex selection abortion

The Daily Mail report March 12th that one of the doctors has already been suspended by the Medical Council and that it is likely that the council will also suspend the others and take away their licence to practice. The folowing is an extract from the Daily Mail article

A doctor who altered paperwork to conceal the fact he was agreeing to an abortion because of the baby's gender has been suspended by the General Medical Council.

 Dr Raj Mohan was filmed at the Calthorpe Clinic in Edgbaston, Birmingham agreeing to a mother's request to abort her baby because she didn't want a girl.

In the video, filmed as part of an undercover investigation, the woman asked him: 'Can we put down a different reason?'

Dr Mohan tells her that to record that she didn't want a girl was 'not a good reason anytime' for an abortion, before saying: 'I'll put down too young for pregnancy, yeah?'

The GMC's Interim Orders Panel has now suspended Dr Mohan from practising pending a full investigation of his actions, recorded by undercover reporters for The Daily Telegraph.

Medics Dr Prabha Sivaraman and Miss Claudine Domoney have also been told by the panel that they 'must not authorise any termination of pregnancy or carry out any termination of pregnancy work, either by consultation or surgery', the Telegraph reports today.

It is now likely that all will face GMC Fitness to Practise panels which could strip of their right to work as a doctor after the newspaper filmed them agreeing to abort foetuses because they were the 'wrong' gender.

According to the 1967 Abortion Act, doctors are allowed to carry out terminations if they think there is a risk to the mother's physical or mental health.

However, to abort a foetus solely on the basis of gender is illegal and offenders risk a possible prison sentence. 

The way the abortion industry flourishes is by dehumanising the unborn baby and all the major newspapers fall into the trap (many willingly) as in this extract from the Daily Mail article in general and the last sentence in particular. This is done by referring to the the "termination of a pregnancy" or "abortion of a foetus" rather than the termination of the life of a baby or aborting a baby. This is the so called acceptable language that is designed to focus on anything but the humanity of the unborn baby and it needs to be tackled continuously. 

Sex Selective Abortions in the UK

The killing of unborn babies simply because they are female is common in Asian countries particularly India and it has been estimated that there are around 300,000000 (three hundred million) missing girls as a result there. 

It is only in recent times however that this practice has been investigated in Western countries where abortion is available virtually on demand irrespective of what national laws say. 

The Daily Telegraph recounts, in two reports, how by use of sting operations in the UK, it established that female feticide is also practiced in UK abortion clinics.

In the first of these articles carried out in Manchester the Telegraph reports as follows

In the undercover filming Miss Prabha Sivaraman, a consultant who works for both private clinics and NHS hospitals in Manchester, told a pregnant woman who said she wanted to abort a female foetus, "I don''t ask questions. If you want a termination, you want a termination".

She later telephoned a colleague to book the procedure, explaining that it was for “social reasons” and the woman “doesn’t want questions asked”.

She said to her colleague: “This [the termination] will be under private, she doesn’t want to go through NHS. Okay, so - that’s right, because you’re part of our team and she doesn’t want questions asked”.

Miss Sivaraman, who works for the Pall Mall Medical Centre in Manchester and also as a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at North Manchester General Hospital, said that the cost of the termination would be £200 or £300, on top of the £500 already paid to the clinic for the consultation with her.

After taking the woman’s contact details, Dr Sivaraman asked her if she had considered her options. “Oh, absolutely… I can’t have it, this baby, because of the gender, so that’s just how it is…” replied the woman.

The second report refers to a Birmingham abortion clinic and is reported as follows

Abortion investigation: Doctor admits procedure tantamount to 'female infanticide'

One of Britain’s oldest abortion clinics is facing a police investigation after staff were caught falsifying paperwork and a doctor admitted that an abortion he was offering was tantamount to “female infanticide”.

The Calthorpe Clinic has been exposed for illicitly completing abortion forms amid concerns that doctors are not properly consulting patients before agreeing to terminations. A doctor at the clinic in Edgbaston, Birmingham, was also secretly filmed offering to arrange an abortion for a woman who said she wanted to terminate her pregnancy because the baby was a girl.

“It’s like female infanticide isn’t it?” said Dr Raj Mohan before agreeing to conduct the procedure. So-called “sex-selection” terminations are illegal.

 

When the pregnant woman asked if he could put down a different reason for the termination, the doctor said: “That’s right, yeah, because it’s not a good reason anytime … I’ll put too young for pregnancy, yeah?”

The patient agreed, at which point Dr Mohan again said: “It’s common in the Third World to have a female infanticide.”

He then moved on to discuss the abortion process before asking the pregnant patient to book an appointment for the termination the following Monday or Tuesday.

A nurse at the same clinic was also made aware that the reason for the abortion was because the patient “did not want a girl” but did not object to the procedure taking place.

The patient was not offered any counselling and there was no discussion of the wisdom of her requesting the sex-selection abortion.

The disclosures are likely to lead to growing pressure for pregnant women considering an abortion to be offered independent counselling.

Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, passed a dossier of alleged malpractice at the clinic to detectives. He also referred concerns over “criminal” practices at two other abortion clinics to the police and General Medical Council.

It is understood that the NHS watchdog that monitors the clinics, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), had already alerted the Health Secretary to concerns over the documentation being used by the Calthorpe Clinic.

The head of CQC, which also oversees care homes and hospitals, resigned following a Department of Health report that criticised the quango.

The Telegraph carried out an investigation into sex-selection abortions after specific concerns were raised that the procedures were becoming increasingly common for cultural and social reasons.

India's Population Policies

The BBC report today on a new population control measure in India. Health officials in the Indian state of Rajasthan are apparently launching a new campaign to try reduce the high population growth in the area.

They are encouraging both men and women to volunteer for sterilisation, and in return are offering a car and other prizes for those who come forward. Among the rewards on offer is the Indian-made Tata Nano - the world's cheapest car.

This report comes hard on the heels of a report in the Foreign Policy Magazine "where have all the girls gone" 

This is in fact a very interesting article and whilst I would not agree with everything it says it makes a number of very important observations on the problems arising from the issue of sex selection. The article also points to the underlying international hostility to population growth and attributes the policy in the right direction. 

The answer to the question where have all the girls gone is of course very simple they have not been spirited away by some modern day "pied piper" they have been terminated. I have included some extracts from the very long article below but have included a link to the complete article above

[...] The story begins in the mid-20th century, when several factors converged to make Western demographers worried about global population growth. Thanks to advances in public health, people were living longer than ever before. Projections released by the U.N. Population Division in 1951 suggested what the sum of all those extra years of life could be: Rapid population growth was on the horizon, particularly in the developing world. As pundits forecast a global "population explosion," anxiety mounted in policy circles, and the population control movement that coalesced brought together everyone from environmentalists to McCarthyites. Viewed through a 1960s Beltway lens, mounting numbers of people meant higher rates of poverty, which in turn made countries more vulnerable to communism.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and the Rockefeller Foundation were among the organizations that poured money into stanching the birth rate abroad, while the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and the Population Council helped coordinate efforts on the ground. As these organizations backed research into barriers to couples accepting contraception, one of the obstacles quickly identified was that in most parts of the world, but particularly in fast-growing Asia, people continued to have children until they got a boy. As demographer S.N. Agarwala explained in a paper on India he presented at a 1963 IPPF conference in Singapore: "[S]ome religious rites, especially those connected with the death of the parents, can be performed only by the male child.... [T]hose who have only daughters try their best to have at least one male child." Even in the United States, surveys suggested a preference for sons.[...]

[...] In India, meanwhile, advisors from the World Bank and other organizations pressured the government into adopting a paradigm, as public-health activist Sabu George put it to me, "where the entire problem was population." The Rockefeller Foundation granted $1.5 million to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the country's top medical school, and the Ford Foundation chipped in $63,563 for "research into reproductive biology." And sometime in the mid-1960s, Population Council medical director Sheldon Segal showed the institute's doctors how to test human cells for the sex chromatins that indicated a person was female -- a method that was the precursor to fetal sex determination.

Soon after, the technology matured, and second-trimester fetal sex determination became possible using amniocentesis. In 1975, AIIMS doctors inaugurated sex-selective abortion trials at a government hospital, offering amniocentesis to poor women free of charge and then helping them, should they so choose, to abort on the basis of sex. An estimated 1,000 women carrying female fetuses underwent abortions. The doctors touted the study as a population control experiment, and sex-selective abortion spread throughout India. In his autobiography, Segal professed to being shocked to learn that doctors at AIIMS were using a variation on his instructions to perform sex-selective abortions. But he neglected to mention that shortly after his stay in India he stood before an audience at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and described sex selection as a method of population control. (The minutes from the meeting describe "sex determination at conception" -- now finally available today through advances in assisted reproductive technology -- but in-utero sex determination was the form of sex selection furthest along at that point.) [...]

 

Sex selection abortion in India

A new study published in the Lancet on Tuesday estimates that sex selective abortion of baby girls in India has led to 7.1 million fewer girls than boys up to age six. It also says that the gender gap that has widened by more than a million in a decade (according to an AFP report)

The study reveals that many Indian families, in which the first child is a girl, arrange for prenatal ultrasound testing with a view to establishing the sex of their babies and will abort a second female in the hope that a subsequent pregnancy will yield a boy.

In the study, researchers led by Prabhat Jha of the Centre for Global Health at the University of Toronto, analysed census data from 2011 and earlier.

They also examined over 250,000 births from national surveys to calculate the difference in the girl-boy ratio for second births in families in which the first-born child had been a girl.

They found that this ratio fell from 906 girls per 1,000 boys in 1990 to 836 girls per 1,000 boys in 2005, an annual decline of a half of a percent.

Declines were much greater in mothers who had gone to school for at least ten years than in mothers with no education at all. The same trend held true for wealthier households compared to poorer ones.

The increasingly lopsided ratio of girls to boys however is larger in wealthy households than poorer ones, the researchers reported.

Between 1980 and 2010, they estimate, up to 12 million girls may have been aborted because of their sex.

Well done to Fiorella Nash in highlighting the human tragedy associated with this barbaric practice in her BLOG