Word watching 1 Abortuary

Abortuary

If you are concerned at the high number of abortions that take place in this country and elsewhere you will immediately recognise the point being made in the term ‘abortuary’. Coined in the late 1980s the term is used to refer to an abortion clinic and amalgamates the words abort and mortuary. The purpose is to emphasise that every time an abortion is performed a death results. As much as any mortuary, an abortion clinic is a place of death. Unlike a mortuary, however, the deaths of babies in abortion clinics are all preventable.

An anti-abortion or pro-life group called the Prolife action league is much in favour of this sort of emotive language. In a series of 99 things you can do about abortion they include use of ‘inflammatory rhetoric’. Most of the language they have in mind would only be ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ to pro-abortionists. For example, ‘baby’ rather than foetus, foetal tissue or the outrageous POC (‘product of conception’) and ‘mother’ rather than ‘pregnant woman’ and ‘killing a baby’ rather than ‘interrupting a pregnancy’.

Some doctors object to being known as abortionists. American doctor, Robert Tamis, is an example named by another organisation. He wants to be known as a ‘fertility specialist’ but what many women who seek his help do not realise is that, despite his efforts to help them conceive at other times in the week, on Tuesday and Saturday he kills approximately 20 babies a morning.

Christians are well used to this reticence. Many have a distaste for terms like fornication or adultery and prefer ‘pre-marital sex’ or ‘having an affair’. Perhaps terms like ‘pro-life’ and ‘abortuary’ are inflammatory. The Pro-life action league recognises that constant use of such terms can be counter-productive. Nevertheless such terms can be useful in shocking people into realising what is going on.

Other terms for abortion clinics include ‘Death camp’ and ‘Abortion mill’. The word ‘holocaust’ has often been applied to the whole sorry spectacle of mass death that characterises the twentieth century abortion industry. Such terms emphasise that just as under Hitler a mechanistic, conveyor belt approach to death existed, so, perhaps for the first time in history, abortionists take the same cold, ruthless line with unwanted babies today.

We cannot condone attacks on abortionists and abortion clinics and we may see little point in ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ but we cannot close our eyes to what is going on. Every day in cardboard boxes marked ‘Medical Services - Regulated Medical Waste’ or something similar, mangled, bloody bodies and torn limbs from tiny babies are taken across town to be incinerated. Can we have any sympathy at all for a man like Henry Morgentaler who alone has been personally responsible for some 100,000 abortions in Canada, a man who can say ‘I’m quite proud of this accomplishment ... This is my calling in life, it’s my art … I should be given a medal for the compassionate service I have performed for women in this country’!?

Rather are our sympathies not rather with American Joe Scheidler who says, ‘We live in a sick nation whose highest court legalised child murder, whose medical profession commits the carnage, whose government approves of it, whose legal system defends it, whose legislatures pass laws to protect it … and whose journalists have consistently conducted a program of silence and misinformation regarding this holocaust known as legal abortion.’

This article first appeared in Grace Magazine

Late Twentieth Century Barbarity - An example

I sometimes try to imagine a school history class at some future date studying the closing years of the twentieth century (and into the 21st). I imagine their utter disbelief when they learn about attitudes in this period towards the unborn.

It is not difficult to imagine. I remember my own amazement learning about the slave trade that had gone on in the 18th and 19th centuries. What was staggering was not just the slave trade itself but the way it was defended even by some who professed to be Christians.

Will a future generation be equally bewildered?

Will they understand why sometimes in the same street you have people who desperately want to adopt children and others who are having their unborn offspring killed in the womb?

Will they be able to comprehend the anguish of a woman in hospital for fertility treatment who finds herself in the bed next to another woman who has just had an abortion?

Will they be able to comprehend the logic of a hospital where there is a desperate struggle to preserve the life of a baby 24 weeks on from conception in one room, while in another they are destroying another just a few weeks younger?

What will they make of gynaecology professor Philip Bennett for instance? He spoke openly last August of how ‘I dismember the foetus, pull it apart limb by limb and remove it piece by piece.’ Here is a man who kills as many babies as he delivers, yet who does not hide in shame but wallows in his butchery by speaking about it to a Sunday newspaper.

What will they make of another senior gynaecologist who declared that he would sack any of his staff who dared to suggest to an expectant mother that she would be better to have her unwanted child adopted rather than aborting it?

Will they not be horrified to learn how, because a woman finds the thought of twins unthinkable, it is perfectly legitimate for a doctor to inject poison into one of the two children in her womb so that one is born whole while the other dies in the womb? It is difficult to think of anything more barbaric.

How will they react to the trivialisation of life that is part of the IVF programme in this country where thousands of embryos are created with no hope of their survival?

Or what about the mass slaughter of thousands that did survive, despite many genuine offers to save the lives of these unborn innocents?

Will they believe it when they learn how abortion is presented as ‘a woman’s right to choose’, yet all the while women who would really like to have children are being pressurised by men into getting rid of their unborn children.

Will they not be utterly staggered that until relatively recently it has been medical practice to assume that an unborn child feels no pain? ‘What was it like back then?’ they will ask, ‘Were they completely ignorant?’

Far more important than what a future generation may say is what God does say. He says,

Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves. Rescue those being led away to death Defend the cause of the weak .... and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

The 19th century slave trade was ended, under God, not only through the work of Wilberforce and other prominent figures but through the work of a host of ordinary men and women who did what they could. By the grace of God, may we also be used so that this barbaric onslaught against the unborn will also soon be brought to an end.

A Grace Magazine editorial from December 1996. Nothing has really changed.