LAW, POLITICS, SCIENCE IN AUSTRALIA

Late-term abortion a life and death debate

January 2008, Dr David Van Gend | THE claim that late-term abortion is done only in cases of lethal abnormality or to save the mother's life is demonstrably false. The truth is that most late abortions, which are 20 weeks of pregnancy, are done to entirely healthy babies of entirely healthy mothers, and by a method so cruel I am reluctant to describe it.

In many cases these are babies older than those in our hospital nurseries, who might have been born alive and adopted to loving parents, but were instead "terminated".

Dr Lachlan De Crespigny and Prof Julian Savulescu (Opinion 23/1) state that late abortion is done only "for major problems as a last resort", giving the example of a lethal heart abnormality in the fetus.

The medical data tells a different story. In Victoria, the most recent data is from the Health Department's 2005 survey of perinatal deaths. The majority of late abortions were for psychosocial reasons, not fetal abnormality.

ABORTION: Five doctors and a dead baby

2007, Endeavour Forum Media Release | Timed to perfection in the week before Victoria’s recent state election, an eminent Melbourne obstetrician and gynaecologist made an emotive plea for the decriminalisation of abortion, reports

In an article, “A child is unborn” (Herald Sun, November 20, 2006), former head of ultrasound at Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital, Dr Lachlan de Crespigny, appeared to endorse Victoria’s Steve Bracks Labor Government, which is reportedly committed to decriminalisation of abortion. (The Bracks Government was re-elected on November 25 for another four-year term). In his article, Dr de Crespigny makes several questionable assertions. His article refers to the termination six years ago - because the mother was threatening to commit suicide - of the life of a 31-weeks-gestation baby, suspected of “dwarfism”.

The termination caused considerable controversy, with investigations by the Royal Women’s Hospital (where the procedure occurred), the police, the coroner, the Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria, and Senator Julian McGauran, who took up the cause of the baby. Dr de Crespigny writes about the “persecution” of the abortionists and the depression of the mother.

Contrary to Dr de Crespigny’s assertion, this baby was born. However, it was ensured that she was born dead because potassium chloride was injected into her heart before labour was induced. The unfortunate mother had to give birth in the usual way, the only difference being that her baby was born dead.

Worldviews and Baby Killing

March 2008, Bill Muehlenberg, Culture Watch | Do worldviews matter? You bet they do. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences. Bad worldviews lead to some very bad outcomes. Take but one example: infanticide. The ancients practiced it with impunity, but Jews and Christians strongly opposed the practice.

So much so that the practice was made illegal in the fourth century. That was because Christian influence had by then thoroughly permeated the Roman Empire. And yet our secularist buddies keep telling us how terrible it is when religion gets mixed with politics. There are millions of people who were spared infanticide who would very much disagree with this secularist nonsense.

So the old adage about bad trees and bad fruit is worth keeping in mind here. Some of the more consistent atheists such as Nietzsche recognised that Christian morality springs from Christian teaching. He knew that if you kill the beliefs, the ethics will soon give way as well. One commentator writing back in 1996 for First Things put it this way:

“In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche denounced the Victorians and ‘little moralistic females a la [George] Eliot’ as ‘English flatheads’ for thinking that they could preserve Christian morality without God. Nietzsche was no proponent of a Christian ethics, but he saw clearly that such ethics relies on the publicly held proposition of God’s existence. Neither Jews nor Christians have always lived up to their ethical systems, but the notion of reverence for individual lives is born (in the West at least) solely from a Judeo-Christian impulse.”

... “As the West loses some of its Biblical moral footing there is a new effort to decriminalize infanticide. In ancient Rome, babies born with disabilities or serious illnesses were often exposed on hills, a barbaric practice that was eventually stopped when (and because) Christianity became the Empire’s official religion. Alas, killing babies born with birth defects is making a comeback in our Post Christian times. Indeed, support for infanticide is not only gaining respectability among the bioethics and medical intelligentsia - it is becoming positively trendy.”