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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 9. 1ts May 1973

Prof Liley Raises Questions

Prof Liley Raises Questions

At a recent meeting for the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, the national president. Professor A.W. Liley, said that the steady upward creep of what are still ludicrously called "therapeutic" abortions in New Zealand suggests the "inevitability of gradualness", the same sort of progression which saw the Weimar Republic become the SS State of Hitler. That the president of the Abortion Law Reform Association should report this trend, with apparent satisfaction is an interesting measure of the sincerity of the claim that the organisation does not wish to see more abortions.

According to Professor Liley, the longer this trend continues the more lurid become the statistics, the more blatant become the abuses and the greater becomes the discrepancy between the misplaced idealism of some legislators and the sordid reality of the practice. In this context he said, these claims and questions needed re-examination:

1) If, as we have been told, the majority of women needing abortions are not promiscuous and irresponsible but are married and responsible, how does it happen that half of the women having abortions in Britain are single divorced or widowed?

The legislators of Hawaii were a tittle bewildered after being reassured that the majority of candidates for abortion—would be married, to find that 85 percent were single.

2) If abortion is the neat and tidy answer to illegitimacy, how can anyone explain in the 1970 UK figures which show that 4-5 abortions have to be done to prevent the live birth of one illegitimate baby? (Registrar-General's Statistical Review of England and Wales 1970: Supplement on Abortion 1972; National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child, Annual Report, April, 1970 - March 1971.)

3. If legal abortion is the answer to illegal abortion how can 58,663 legal abortions notified to the Registrar-General in the UK in 1969 produce a fall of twelve in maternal deaths from illegal abortions and produce a corresponding 12 deaths from legal abortions to leave the total precisely as before? (British Medical Journal, 30/9/72, page 826.)

We are assured, of course, that the explanation lies in the late stage of pregnancy at which UK legal abortions are done—they should have been done safely in the first trimester as in Hungary—but...

4. Why have Hungarian claims of only 1.2 deaths/100,000 first trimester abortions been not remotely approached by first trimester abortion mortality in Denmark, Yugoslavia or Oregon (23.0, 22.5, 18.6 per 100,000 first trimester abortion respectively)?

Hungarian claims of the safety of abortion look extremely suspect alongside an overall maternal mortality among the worst in Europe and a high death rate from spontaneous abortion.

5. If abortion and family planning are the answers to the 'battered baby' and 'child abuse', how could the 4½-year survey of 400 battered babies by Professor Lenkowski, Department of Pediatrics, USC Medical School, find that 90% were in fact planned pregnancies?

Is abortion the answer to the battered baby—or simply another and more lethal manifestation of it—of a trend which no longer regards children as children but as property or chattels to be disposed of or dealt with at a parent's whim?

6. If contraception and education are the answers to unwanted pregnancy and the alternative to abortion, how can we believe the experience of Dr. Michael Brudenell at King's College Hospital: "Of 300 women with unplanned pregnancies request termination and seen by me personally, 79% had used either no contraception at all or a method which they knew to be unsatisfactory. Among this group were many intelligent women, including students, nurses, teaches and doctors and barristers.

"Furthermore, few of these unplanned pregnancies resulted from a single unplanned intercourse: most were the result of regular liaisons so that failure to take proper contraceptive measures in these patients is a recurrent phenomenon." (Proc. Roy. Soc. Med. 65, 155-158.)

'And how' Professor Liley asked, 'does one explain that Sweden with two generations of sex education, can still have a rising illegitimacy rate, a rising abortion rate and a rising VD rate?

The submissions of the Royal College of Obstreticians and Gynaecologists to the Lane Commission ended with the usual pious platitudes about the need for more sex education and freer availability of contraception.

A leader in the British Medical Journal on "Unplanned Pregnancies" shared these sentiments. This led one exasperated reader (British Medical Journal, 6/5/72, p. 348) to write: "When will we ever learn? For never in the whole field of human history has so much been spoken so freely and openly and for so long, on so singular a subject as sex is now. To deny this is merely foolish.

"Yet in spite of this unwanted pregnancies continue not to decline but to escalate. Clearly there is something wrong somewhere. It teems to me that education itself may be one of the factors, especially if it is the wrong education, as much of the current propaganda would seem to be.

"At least some pro-abortionists have the candour to drop any facade of philanthropy and preach an unadulterated hedonism and doctrine of "situation ethics" and "enriching experience". Some are still squeamish enough to prefer a semantic smokescreen and are distressed by the publication of unpalatable facts.

"Dr. Lendrum Shettles is a world authority on early human development and the implantation of the fertilised ovum. He stated that it was indisputable that human life began at conception. Colleagues asked him to retract this statement as it was 'disturbing'. In a letter to the New York Times, Doctor Shettles publicly declined to do so.

"When Mr Justice Blackman, Senior Justice of the nine-man US Supreme Court Bench, was asked why, since the court had discarded historic claims of the humanity of the foetus, they had not considered modern evidence, he replied that the court had not had time."

Someone, however, has to have—or make—time for the foetus, and that is what the membership of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child is about.