A British psychologist has said the overwhelming majority of Britain’s abortions are “probably illegal” and that a “charade” is operating around the country’s abortion laws.
Addressing a London conference Nov. 29th, Dr. Michael Scott said 99% of abortions in Britain performed each year to protect the mental health of the mother could not be scientifically justified.
<p>The consultant psychologist, who often serves as an “expert witness” with the regional police force in Liverpool, said a “charade” is operating around the working of the 1967 Abortion Act that legalised abortion in Britain.
Abortions on mental health grounds were so dishonest, he said, that they were effectively illegal.
He called for the total abolition of Ground C, the section that permits abortion when the “continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated”.
It is under Ground C that nearly all of about 200,000 abortions are performed annually in Britain, most of them for so-called “social” reasons.
Britain’s chief prosecutor caused controversy earlier this year when he said Ground C could also have been used to legally justify the sex-selective abortions of female foetuses because of their gender.
Dr Scott, an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder and author of 10 books on psychology, said the bogus mental health reasons for abortions under Ground C also made the law impossible to either police or regulate.
Any attempted justification of abortion on Ground C “should be treated with great suspicion”, he said, adding that the section was not “fit for purpose”.
He noted from experience that whereas assessments for extreme trauma undergo rigorous examination, that is certainly not the case when it comes to terminations. He described both fields as parallel universes, leading him to see most abortions as illegal.
Dr. Scott said he felt there was a “lot of dishonesty” in the area of abortion – a view, he said, shared by people who are pro-abortion. Of the thousands of abortion cases he said he had studied, not one had involved a woman seeking to end her pregnancy on mental health grounds.
“We have de facto abortion on demand,” he said.
“I doubt it was the intent of most of the supporters of the Act,” he said. “How do we move on from abortion being treated like a visit to the dentist to a more appropriate societal response?”
The London conference was organised by the Medical Ethics Alliance.
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Read more on the Diocese of Shrewsbury website
