Joe Biden is clearly a religious man. But, sadly, the religion he appears to follow is not Christian. In a latest move designed to facilitate veneration of the great god Self, whose worship is founded on sexual licence and absence of all restraint, the American President has confirmed previously temporary measures allowing women to obtain abortion drugs by post, without any necessity for prior in-person consultation with a doctor or certified abortion provider.
Such a move does not just trivialise life, but puts abortion on a par with buying an over-the-counter treatment for something such as a verruca or headache. Unwanted, annoying and definitely unpleasant – but fixable.
There are, of course, similar calls to make so-called DIY abortion permanent in the UK, as supported by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, whose endorsement admittedly feels something of an oxymoron. But pills by post, advocates argue, give a more positive patient experience, allowing women to have a termination in the safety and comfort of their own homes. Bless.
However, freedom of information requests made to NHS Trusts across England for the period April 2020 to September 2021 have dented this rosy picture. Data collected reveals, for example, that after taking the pills, 1 in 17 women subsequently needed hospital treatment, with 2.3% requiring treatment for haemorrhage, and 3.0% requiring surgical evacuation.
Even more disturbing than the figures, however, is the fact that abortion providers and the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) are under-reporting complications, despite the fact that at least 5.9% of women taking the pills will subsequently need emergency hospital treatment.
This is scandalous. Either the NHS, and abortion providers in particular, are woefully incompetent, or as part of the ideological drive to decriminalise abortion and make it available up to term and on request, there has been an active and duplicitous decision to misrepresent the facts, and so misinform the public.
The same double-dealing is to be seen in the controversy currently raging over 'abortion reversal'. In recent months, following the roll-out of telemedicine abortion, pro-life organisations have urged women who 'change their minds' after taking one of the two pills to get in touch if they would like help to try and reverse the procedure. In the United States, the Abortion Pill Rescue Network claims to have helped 2,500 such women save their babies in the last year alone.
In the UK, until recently, a similar service has been offered by vocal anti-abortion campaigner Dermot Kerney, a Catholic consultant cardiologist at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. No one knows the exact numbers of women who 'change their minds' in this way, but there seems to be a fair number and, in an effort to help, Dr Kearney has been prescribing high doses of the hormone progesterone in an attempt to combat the effects of mifepristone, the first of the two pills designed to start termination.
Let us be clear, Dr Kearney has never claimed the treatment is fool proof, but, if taken within 24 hours of the first pill, progesterone will, he says, double the chances of the foetus surviving from 25% to 50%. As proof, and with his help, 30 babies have so far survived, and there are reportedly more to come.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, abortion provider MSI Reproductive Choices UK – formerly known as Marie Stopes International, before being forced to abandon that name because of their founder's association with eugenics and Adolf Hitler – has taken exception to this, branding the possibility of reversal once the process has been initiated as not just a 'myth', but inherently dangerous.
As a result, Dr Kearney has now been placed under investigation by the General Medical Council (GMC), accused of prescribing unproven and 'unethical' treatment, not approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). He faces being struck off.
Such treatment does not, however, carry any official warning from the NHS or the Department of Health – as might be expected – while to say the evidence for such allegations is scant would itself be an overstatement.
In fact, what 'evidence' there is would seem rather to imply that this is an orchestrated campaign of vilification by abortion activists, seeking to perpetuate the notion that women have an unquestioned and absolute right to end the life of their unborn children.
How strange then that abortion providers are so keen to accuse those seeking only to save life of peddling deliberate misinformation and lies.
President Biden should hang his head in shame. Permanently lifting all restrictions on obtaining abortion pills by post is not empowering women. Rather, it is giving support to the duplicitous double standards of a multi-million pound industry that feeds off death, and is endangering the future of the entire human race.
Rev Lynda Rose is founder of Voice for Justice UK, a group which works to uphold the moral values of the Bible in society.
