British abortion doctor alleges that practice of sex-selection abortion is widespread

As reported by Clare Newell and Holly Watt in the Daily Telegraph (London), February 24, 2012:

A former medical director of the country’s largest abortion provider said it was “well known” that women were terminating pregnancies because of the gender of the child and that he had been asked by women to arrange the procedure for this reason.

Dr Vincent Argent, who previously worked for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and is now a GP and consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, said he had “no doubt” that women were terminating pregnancies because of the sex of the baby and that he believed the practice was “fairly widespread”. This week The Daily Telegraph disclosed that women were being offered illegal abortions by doctors on the basis of the gender of the foetus.

Dr Argent said there were “an awful lot of covert abortions for sex selection going on” where women would have a scan or blood test to find out the sex, then ask for a termination without telling the doctor the real reason.

However, he said there were also “ones where the patient actually says that it is the reason she wants the termination of the pregnancy”. He confirmed that he had been asked to arrange abortions for this reason but had told the patients it was unethical and he could not help them. There is nothing to suggest that the terminations Dr Argent described were arranged at BPAS clinics.

Dr Argent also disclosed that he believed that some colleagues had arranged terminations relating to the sex of the foetus and they felt it was reasonable to do so.

“I’ve had a consultant colleague in the North who expressed a view — that consultant was from an ethnic minority … He didn’t think it was ethically wrong because he thought that the cultural reason why some communities may prefer to have four male babies is as good a reason as the, if you like, the Anglo-Saxon cultural view, 'Well I’m pregnant, I just don’t want it anyway.’  ”

Dr Argent said his colleague equated sex-selection terminations with abortions that he considered were carried out “on demand” at many clinics.

The Telegraph this week exposed three doctors who offered terminations after being told by a woman that she was unhappy with the gender. One doctor at the Calthorpe clinic in Birmingham admitted that the abortion was like “female infanticide” before agreeing to falsify the paperwork. Another consultant at Pall Mall Medical in Manchester was filmed telling a pregnant woman who said she wanted to abort a female foetus: “I don’t ask questions. If you want a termination, you want a termination”.

The Metropolitan Police began an investigation following the disclosures.

However, Dr Argent said the law on sex selective abortions was unclear and suggested that it was not illegal “because it doesn’t say that in the Act”. “It is certainly considered to be unethical by the General Medical Council. But there has never been a legal test case which has actually said it’s illegal,” he said.

Dr Argent said aborting a baby due to its gender was “more common among some ethnic communities” but that it “happens in all communities”.

He said previously that GPs routinely flouted the law by signing abortion consent forms without seeing patients. In some cases, they rubber-stamped the forms after the procedure.

Blogger Vox Day offered this commentary:

One of the remarkable shared idiocies of the left and right alike is their staunch refusal to understand that immigrants from foreign cultures will not only retain many of their traditions from their former societies, but will view Western traditions through their own cultural lens and will therefore tend to expand Western customs in various ways not always anticipated...

...Of course, they are absolutely right. If abortion is morally and legally acceptable, it is acceptable for any reason. In fact, there is no moral or legal reason why people shouldn't offer financial incentive to encourage undesirable populations to obtain abortions. The federal government could even require abortions of all minority populations for those choosing to apply for welfare payments and there would be no logical or moral reason to oppose any such policy.

The disappearance of children with Down's Syndrome is largely the result of abortion and pre-natal testing. So, we can anticipate that the more immigration that takes place into the West, the more the male-female ratios will come to resemble those in India and China.

HT: Vox Popoli