Abortion… What UK Children are Being Told in Schools

 

abortion-every-28-seconds

Anti-abortion campaigners in Britain are making controversial claims
that abortions are linked to an increased risk of breast cancer, in a
presentation to children in school which has been obtained by the Guardian.

Pupils were told that abortion can cause infertility and result in the
death of the mother, and were shown a video by a Christian campaigner
from the US who calls for abortion to be made “unthinkable”.

Conceiving a child after rape is the “ultimate unplanned pregnancy”, but
to have an abortion at this stage can be a “second trauma,” children at
a secondary school in Cambridgeshire were told.

“For some people who’ve been raped and had the baby, even if they don’t
keep it, something positive comes out of that whole rape experience,”
pupils aged 14 and 15 were told.

The presentation, by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, also refers to a teenage girl who died after an abortion and a young woman who committed suicide after aborting twins.

Britain’s biggest abortion provider, the British Pregnancy Advisory
Service, warned recently that it is facing “a new era” in anti-abortion
protest after women were filmed arriving at and leaving its London clinic.

Pro-choice campaigners plan a counter-protest there next week.

The anti-abortion school presentation at the end of February is part of a
series of talks the SPUC has given at schools and meetings of parents
which challenge abortion and sex education. The group campaigns for a
ban on what they describe as “explicit” sex education in schools.

The school presentation was disclosed to the Guardian by Feminist Action Cambridge, a local activist group that had been invited to give a talk at the school on the same day.

In reference to the children at Comberton village college being told
that abortion could trigger breast cancer, the female representative of
SPUC said:

“The link with breast cancer is because if a woman has an
abortion, particularly in her first pregnancy, changes have to take
place in her breasts.

If during that pregnancy she has an abortion … then it can leave
those cells in the breasts in a kind of half-changed state and
statistically, that increases her risk of developing breast cancer later
on in life.”

 

The SPUC representative added: “I’m not saying this is something that’s going to happen to everybody.”

A study co-ordinated
by Cancer Research UK and published in the Lancet has shown that
abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer.

The SPUC talk took place as part of a discussion of medical ethics at
the school, which also featured a “pro-choice” talk by the feminist
group.

The SPUC representative claimed that after abortion some women
experienced trauma which was “a form of post-traumatic stress disorder”.

The children were shown two videos. One was a short film detailing the development of the foetus.

The second was a video message from a US anti-abortion campaigner, who
says: “I believe with everything in me that women deserve better than
abortion, and we cannot continue – whether it stays legal in a country
or not, we need to make abortion unthinkable and unnecessary, because
we know … that abortion hurts women.”

The anti-abortion speaker mentioned two cases in which abortions were
linked to the deaths of the mother. Referring to Manon Jones, an
18-year-old from Bristol who died in 2005, she said: “In rare cases
women will die from having an abortion … Even in legal abortions women
will die.”

The inquest in the case
heard Jones died because of delays giving her a blood transfusion. She
went on holiday two weeks after the abortion, against medical advice.

Emma-Rose Cornwall, one of the feminist activists who attended the talk,
said:

“SPUC’s supposed concern for zygotes is a poorly concealed desire
to see women forced back into their ‘god-given’ roles as mothers and
housewives, and simultaneously to punish what they perceive as
promiscuous sexuality.”

Cornwall said she and her fellow volunteer asked to sit in on the
anti-abortion session as “we couldn’t get a copy of their material
through the school, because SPUC refused to provide any”.

Michael Bigg, head of religion, philosophy and ethics at the school,
said that a “range of speakers” had been invited in for the ethical
discussion.

“By presenting the issues from a range of perspectives this enables
students to be able to come to a balanced view of the topic and
throughout the day we encourage everyone involved to question what is
presented to them in order to develop their ideas,” he said.

Andrew Copson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association, said:

“It
is deeply disturbing that anti-choice groups are so easily able to
enter schools and present these damaging fictions. Parents and teachers
should be aware of the falsehood of the claims made by SPUC, and the
government should be more pro-active in preventing groups that
persistently make false claims of this nature from having access to
vulnerable children, especially in schools.”

SPUC emailed the Guardian a briefing note which included the claim that:
“a woman will have [a] higher breast cancer risk if she undergoes an
abortion.”

Referring to the school presentation, Anthony McCarthy, publications and
education manager at the SPUC, said:

“She appears, if the report is
accurate, to have been discussing a theory which may possibly explain
some of the correlations that have been observed between abortion and
breast cancer. That would be by no means an endorsement of the view that
x has been proven to cause y.”

Extracts from the school talk

The 1967 Abortion Act

“What the [abortion] act did was effectively make unborn children a
class of non-person. In other words, they didn’t have a right to life.”

Abortion and disability

“This was an act that gave greater rights to protect people with
disabilities… and this is a good thing. But we have a strange
situation where on the one hand we do everything we can to help people
with disabilities after they’re born but it is legal within the Abortion
Act to do abortion for disability right up until the birth of the
baby.”

Women’s reproductive rights

“There are certain things as a society we decide are unacceptable, we
don’t have a right to do. So for example, if somebody were to beat up an
old lady, we wouldn’t say that’s their right to do that. I would say…
I would say without the right to life all the other rights become
irrelevant.”

 

Jeevan Vasagar – March 23, 2012 – SignOfTheTimes

 

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