“Illegal” abortions? Distortions from Dorries, Lansley and the Telegraph

The Telegraph thinks it has a scoop. ONE IN FIVE ABORTION CLINICS BREAK THE LAW, it screams. Womb enthusiast Nadine Dorries and other uterus-fanciers have also jumped on this bandwagon, wheeling out faux-concern with the implicit subtext that maybe we should just shut down everything.

The Telegraph alleges:

I immediately decided that a better source of information on the matter would be to find the original CQC report, rather than a right-wing newspaper which has been quietly agitating against women’s bodily autonomy for the last few months. I searched and I searched. And it appears that the CQC report does not exist online. All search terms simply led back to a string of Telegraph articles on gender-selective abortions. On the CQC’s own website, precisely one search result for “abortion”, which is a response to the Telegraph articles and a promise to investigate, unhelpfully undated.

With this in mind, it is impossible to tell exactly how the abortion clinics are breaking the law, if the “one in five” statistic is true in the first place.

There are several ways in which the “one in five” statistic could be true. The first is the way the Telegraph spins the story: that 20% of abortion providers are evil baby-killing fraudsters who will stop at nothing to whip a girl-foetus out of an unwilling woman. This scenario seems extremely unlikely.

The second–and more plausible–way in which this can be true is if one worker in each of the “one in five” clinics was breaking some sort of law in some sort of way. The magnitude of the offences is largely unknown due to the fact that we cannot read the report to find out. 

It is impossible to tell exactly who is breaking the law here. The inspections happened at 250 clinics, who may or may not have been a representative sample of abortion providers across the UK. All we are told about the facilities is they were a mix of private and NHS providers: again, we cannot know whether these “illegal” occurrences were more likely to happen under private or public healthcare. Considering that the notably right-wing Telegraph hasn’t bothered making a fuss over “taxpayer’s money” paying for these “illegal” abortions, I’d hazard a guess that the private clinics were the ones with the bigger problems. This is purely, of course, an educated guess in a complete lack of information, given that we cannot read the report to find out. 

The “major” problem which was possibly discovered by the CQC if this report were actually available is “pre-signing” of paperwork. Under UK law, two doctors must sign off on the procedure, and in an unknown number of abortions that were not adequately following procedure, some doctors signed the form without bothering with the consultation. While possibly negligent, this also suggests that perhaps some medical professionals do not believe it is necessary for two doctors to complete the procedure: it may be that this is a redundant safeguard which is rejected by those with more knowledge in the area. Pre-signing, though, is a different kettle of fish entirely to the alleged “falsified consent forms”

Along with the probably-not-entirely-fictitious CQC report, it is interesting to note what the Telegraph has chosen to lump in with its screaming about “illegal” abortions: patients not receiving acceptable levels of counselling. The thing with this is, that this isn’t illegal at all. There is nothing in the 1967 Abortion Act making this compulsory. To imply otherwise is highly disingenuous and clearly misleading.

To summarise, the Telegraph “investigation” and Nadine Dorries’s interpretation thereof is dodgy because:

• There is a vast difference between “illegal” and “not in compliance with regulations”
• The report cited is not available to the public to critically appraise
• We do not know who has been failing to comply with regulations
• We do not know how exactly they were failing to comply with regulations
• We do not even know if any of the report cited is true at all
• Throwing in references to “counselling” is irrelevant to any discussion of abortion providers breaking the law

So what function does all of this distortion serve? Odious twat Andrew Lansley makes it clear, his head sadly still not perched atop a pike:

“I was appalled,” he said. “Because if it happens, it is pretty much people engaging in a culture of both ignoring the law and trying to give themselves the right to say that although Parliament may have said this, we believe in abortion on demand.”

…

Mr Lansley warned that so-called abortion on demand was not acceptable. “It’s not what Parliament intended and it’s not what the law provides for,” he said. “My job is to enforce the law.”

That’s right. Abortion on demand is apparently not acceptable. We do not live in a free society wherein any person can choose to end a pregnancy. Despite the illusory freedom we have, it has become abundantly clear that there are some elements who wish to control the bodily autonomy of women, and will gladly do this through misleading–or perhaps outright lying. Abortion on demand is nothing more than a loaded term for “choice”.

This story highlights the precariousness of our freedom. The body fascists have opened up new avenues of attack, and we must be ready.

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Update: It has just come to my attention that there is yet another distortion in the Telegraph piece: although they mention sex-selective abortions, they never state that any instances of this were actually found. Had the report identified this occurring, and given the Telegraph have been banging this drum for months, they would definitely gloat about this. Therefore, the only reason this is mentioned at all is in order to foster this implicit association in readers that sex-selective abortions are commonplace. Which they aren’t at all.

Update 2: @bloggerheads has found the date of the only CQC search result for abortion: 23rd February 2012.