'Brave.' I thought. (Brighton is not exactly liberal about subjects like anti-abortion, for all its 'anything goes' ethos).
I noticed several people standing around poised with leaflets at the ready and did my best to dodge them.
One slightly built well-dressed lady in her sixties collared me though.
'It's ok.' I smiled. 'I'm not a fan either,' smugly assuming this would let me off the hook.
Instead her eyes widened and she rounded on me. 'So what are you DOING about it?' she demanded.
'Erm. Nothing. It's none of my business what other women do.'
'Really?' Her eyes flashed at me. 'So if you lived next door to a young child and heard it being abused every night, you would do nothing, would you?'
'Of course not. That's hardly the same thing.' I replied, somewhat stunned.
'Life is life!' she replied emphatically. 'Thousands of babies are being murdered every day. Cut up in the womb alive, their body parts sold, and people like you are doing nothing. Most women don't even know what happens. They are not being given all the choices. The BPAS is supposed to advise them but it's really just an abortion clinic. So is the Marie Stopes'
'Look, bad stuff happens every day. I replied. We can't possibly campaign against all of it. It's just not possible. And ultimately it's none of my business what other women do with their bodies. I just know it wouldn't be right for me,'
'At least take these leaflets and read about what you are walking way from.' she insisted. I took the leaflets and she let me go.
I walked away marvelling at her tactics and whether she really believed they worked. It was tempting to be rude to her, but despite the steeliness of her resolve, I detected a mental fragility as well in her desperation to convert. I wondered what her back story was. Had she had an abortion and then regretted it? Had someone close to her? Had she been denied a grandchild? Had she been a doctor who performed abortions who switched sides or was she simply a staunch Christian?
I didn't read the leaflets but I didn't throw them away. Later on I recycled them in my local Library next to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service leaflets on abortion, by way of offering some balance. Maybe she had a point. Adoption seems to have become a dirtier word than abortion these days, but it's nevertheless still an option, Perhaps its waning popularity has something to do with the trend of modern women desperate for fertility treatment claiming they 'couldn't love a baby unless it was genetically mine'.
I really don't understand this at all.
My cat is not genetically mine, but I love him unreservedly!
Personally I have always thought it would be a good idea to have women desperate for a baby and women desperate to get rid of an unwanted baby share the same clinic waiting room and be kept at least an hour waiting for their appointments. A lot of human suffering, cost and heartache might be saved if they all got talking to one another and realised they were all human and all suffering though what they did and didn't want. It used to be commonplace for adoption within families for example where an unmarried woman who 'got into trouble' would hand the baby over to a married sister or aunt who would raise it as her own, but with the mother still in the child's life. Yes, there were forced adoptions as well, but those dark days are long gone. There is no shame in being an unmarried mother nowadays, and plenty of support available, in most cases.
Notwithstanding there actually IS a market in aborted baby parts for stem cells, skin grafts and everything else, so abortion is a worldwide racket, and arguably the biggest reason why pregnant women find it so hard to access independent advice.
Recently I read '40 Years of Murder', the autobiography of one of the forensic giants of the 20th century, Keith Simpson. In the 1950s, a badly decomposed body, dressed in the remnants of a summer dress was brought to his pathology lab. She was identified by the dress fabric and the necklace as the wife of a young BBC executive who had gone missing several months previously in the summer. It was hard at first to ascertain the cause of death, but Professor Simpson eventually found enough soft tissue in the womb area to detect a mass of salt water. Her womb had been perforated by an illegal abortionist. The Police interviewed her employer and it emerged she had had an affair with him, fallen pregnant and he had arranged a private abortion for her. She had died shortly after the procedure and her employer arranged with the abortionist to dump her body in a shallow grave in a nearby forest. Unusually both were brought to trial and were convicted of manslaughter.
While abortion will never be risk free, at least its legalision prevented many more horror stories of this nature.
I suppose the biggest thing which puzzles me about abortion is why we have so much of it in a country with free contraception available to all and no shortage of sex education in schools and on TV. I could understand it more if we lived in a third world country or a country where contraception was prohibited for religious reasons.
Prevention will always be better than cure though, and in an overpopulated world, our government should start offering tax incentives to remain child-free or at least limit numbers through proper family planning. We also have plenty of kids languishing in children's homes and on the street desperate for families/couples who claim to love children to adopt or foster.
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