doctors’ college to give platform to pro-abortion lobby

The distortion of good medicine by the pro-abortion lobby continues apace. The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) is holding a one-day course on tackling obesity and teenage pregnancy on 8^th March. Three of the five listed speakers are from the pro-abortion lobby: the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), Brook Advisory Service and the Margaret Pyke Centre. Their presence at this course is entirely inappropriate. The claim that they work to reduce the rates of teenage pregnancies and provide contraception as a means of reducing recourse to abortion is simply false - their own words attest to this. Dr Judy Bury, a former director of the Edinburgh Brook Advisory Centre, explained this clearly:

"Twenty years ago women were more resigned to unwanted pregnancy, but as they have become more conscious of preventing conception so they have come to request terminations when contraception fails. There is overwhelming evidence that, contrary to what you might expect, the provision of contraception leads to an increase in the abortion rate."

As long ago as 1973, David Malcolm Potts, one of Brook's senior medical advisors predicted:

"As people turn to contraception there will be a rise, not a fall in the abortion rate."

He acknowledged this again in 1979 saying:

"No society has controlled its fertility…without recourse to a significant number of abortions. In fact abortion is often the starting place in the control of fertility."

And BPAS's Ann Furedi, for example, told a reporter at last year's Marie Stopes International Global Safe Abortion conference:

"Abortion is normal....Abortion is always necessary as a backup to contraception....For many women abortion is the solution to the problem of unintended pregnancy."

In 2000, Mrs Furedi had also told a conference on abortion law that policymakers should "stop using the abortion rate as the indicator of a problem" but "accept it as an essential method of family planning". She observed: "Sex is an accepted part of an adult relationship for which we do not expect to suffer unwanted consequences." [Daily Mail, 16 October 2000]

As Professor David Paton of Nottingham University has ably demonstrated, greater access to birth control drugs and devices does nothing to decrease the rates of teenage pregnancy or teenage abortions. The makers of birth control pills admit that it can stop young embryos from implanting in the womb (the technical term for this implanting is ‘nidation’ – e.g. see the summary of product characteristics for Norgeston, a common type of birth control pill using the same ingredient, levonorgestrel, as the morning-after pill)

The RCGP should not be giving a platform to the pro-abortion lobby and its flawed, extreme ideology. It's important that concerned doctors contact the RCGP about this. If you know doctors likely to be concerned, ask them to write the President of the RCGP, Professor David Haslam, by email at president@rcgp.org.uk or by post to 14 Princes Gate, London, SW7 1PU.