Join us for what is anticipated to be one of the most significant abortion debates of the decade.
Ann Furedi, CEO of the UK’s largest private abortion provider, BPAS, will be going head to head with Gregg Cunningham, the founder and director of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a group that makes pictures of aborted babies available for public education projects across the globe.
The point of contention is the use of graphic abortion images outside of abortion clinics in the UK.
The Resolution:“This house believes that it is morally wrong for groups to approach women and display abortion imagery outside facilities which provide abortion services.”
The event will be charied by Brendan O’Neill, Editor of Spiked Online. It will take place at 18:30 on 3rd of October at the Emmanuel Centre, Marsham Street, Westminster, SW1P 3DW.
The chief executive of Britain’s biggest abortion charity has said women are legally free to arrange an abortion because they are unhappy with the sex of their unborn baby.
Ann Furedi, of BPAS, said the law does not prevent women from choosing a termination on the grounds of gender and she even compared it to abortion after rape.
Mrs Furedi’s comments come weeks after it was disclosed that the CPS had decided not to prosecute two doctors who were exposed by a Daily Telegraph investigation arranging terminations purely because the unborn baby was a girl.
[…]Writing for online magazine Spiked, she said: “A doctor agreeing to an abortion on grounds of rape would be breaking the law no more and no less than a doctor who agrees an abortion on grounds of sex selection,” she said.
“While it is true that the sex of the foetus is not a legal ground for abortion, nor is rape, or incest, or being 13 years old. Nor is being homeless, or abandoned, or just feeling there’s no way you can bring a child into the world… yet they are all reasons why a doctor may believe a women has met the legal grounds of abortion.”
She added: “The woman gives her reasons, the doctor decides on the grounds as set out in the law … there is no legal requirement to deny a woman an abortion if she has a sex preference, providing that the legal grounds are still met.
“The law is silent on the matter of gender selection, just as it is silent on rape.”
When you talk about being pro-choice, sex selective abortion is often slung at you as the triumphant gotcha. “You love women so much you want them to be in charge of what grows inside their bodies, but what about the women who are aborted, have a go at answering that? ZING!”
The answer is actually remarkably simple, and it’s this: it doesn’t matter whether what’s growing inside you is liable to end up as a man or a woman. What matters is whether the person it’s growing inside – the person who is going to have to deliver the resulting baby, at not inconsiderable personal peril – actually wants to be pregnant and give birth to this child. In a world where it’s possible to end a pregnancy safely and legally, it seems like rank brutality to force anyone to carry to term against her will.
And as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter why any woman wants to end her pregnancy. As the conscious and legally competent entity in the conception set-up, it’s the woman’s say that counts, and even the most terrible reason for having an abortion holds more sway than the best imaginable reason for compelling a woman to carry to term.
The article goes on to accuse pro-lifers of “misogyny” for opposing the murder of unborn girls, just because they are girls.
The Obama administration today filed papers taking the Christian craft store Hobby Lobby to the Supreme Court to make it comply with the HHS mandate that compels religious companies to pay for birth control and abortion-causing drugs for their employees.
In July, a federal court granted Hobby Lobby a preliminary injunction against the HHS abortion-drug mandate. The injunction prevented the Obama administration from enforcing the mandate against the Christian company, but the Obama administration appealed that ruling today. The government’s appeal makes it highly likely that the Supreme Court will decide the issue in the upcoming term.
“The United States government is taking the remarkable position that private individuals lose their religious freedom when they make a living,” said Kyle Duncan, general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and lead lawyer for Hobby Lobby. “We’re confident that the Supreme Court will reject the government’s extreme position and hold that religious liberty is for everyone—including people who run a business.”
Duncan said the appeals court victory for Hobby Lobby this summer had the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals rejecting the Obama administration’s argument that the Green family and their family-owned businesses, Hobby Lobby and a Christian bookstore chain named Mardel, could not legally exercise their religious views. The court further said the businesses were likely to win their challenge to the HHS mandate.
The government’s petition comes the same day as a petition in Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius, another case involving a challenge to the HHS mandate.
The court will consider the government’s petition in the next six weeks. If the petition is granted, the case would be argued and decided before the end of the Court’s term in June.
So now you know what “pro-choice” really means. It means force Christians to pay for drugs that kill unborn babies, against their consciences. It means fascism. Using the power of government to compel people to act against their consciences.
WINTERY KNIGHT 