TV channel defends plan to show an abortion in full

by ignored_one 12 Replies latest watchtower medical

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  RubyTuesday

  86=Main Entry: eighty-six
  Variant(s): or 86 / "A-tE-'siks /
  Function: transitive verb
  Etymology: probably rhyming slang for 3nix
  slang : to refuse to serve (a customer); also : to get rid of : THROW OUT
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  scotsman

  an article by the progamme maker

  http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,1185340,00.html

  My abortion and my baby
  
  Julia Black had a termination at 21, and never questioned her pro-choice beliefs ... until she fell pregnant at 34. In this frank dispatch from both sides of the debate, she asks if it is possible to disentangle facts from emotions
  
  Sunday April 4, 2004
  The Observer Ever since I can remember, I have been pro-choice. When I was five years old my father set up Marie Stopes International, a charity that has grown into one of Britain's largest abortion providers and a leading international reproductive rights agency. So I grew up hearing and believing the mantra, a woman's right to choose.

  When I became pregnant at 34, my beliefs started to come under attack for the first time. As my pregnancy progressed, I began to question my views on abortion. At my first antenatal check-up I was asked if this was my first pregnancy. My answer was: 'No, I've had an abortion.' But the emotions and feelings surrounding my two pregnancies couldn't have been more different.

  I found out I was pregnant at 21. I remember the phone call from my GP telling me the test was positive. I immediately burst into tears. I had ignored all the signs; the late period, the fuller breasts, the nausea. A baby wasn't part of my game plan. That phone call pricked my bubble of denial and I had to make a decision. What was I going to do?

  I told my parents, and they asked whether I wanted to have the baby. I said no. I wasn't ready for a family. I had just left university and was about to start my career. Thanks to the generation before me who fought for the 1967 Abortion Act, I had a get-out clause. I took control of my fertility and had an abortion.

  With my life back on track it was 13 more years before I finally felt ready to start a family. So this time round those tell-tale signs of a pregnancy were greeted with joy. I was feeling sick - hooray! When I felt my baby kick for the first time at 16 weeks it was amazing. Here I was having a relationship with something living inside me, and I began to wonder if I could actually look at the facts of abortion and still be pro-choice.

  In the past I had always dismissed the anti-abortion movement as extremists. But I could no longer do that. I needed to listen to what they had to say because, if I had sworn allegiance to the pro-choice movement without question, then perhaps others had too. If this was the case, one of my basic human rights - the right to control my own fertility - had precarious foundations.

  I decided to make a film about my journey and pitched the idea to Channel 4. As I began my research I discovered many in the anti-abortion movement accused the media and pro-choicers of collaborating in a cover-up. They believe abortion can exist as a legitimate medical procedure only because the public doesn't know the truth. They say the media have censored their message and the abortion providers remain silent about the physical reality of what they do.

  I met people from both sides and what surprised me was how much language they shared. I would interview someone opposed to abortion one day and a doctor who performs abortions the next, and when I stripped away their moral views they shared many beliefs. They both marvelled at the first few cells that eventually form a human being and there was no difference in their respect for the foetus or their view about the unpalatable nature of abortion. This presented me with a problem: how could I admit abortion destroys a life, or a potential life, and still be pro-choice?

  Now that I had become two bodies in one, I began to feel pulled in two directions. As my pregnancy entered the third trimester I found it increasingly difficult to disassociate abortion per se with my now well-developed baby. Hearing the doctor's description of performing a late abortion was very difficult. I reread the statistics to put things in perspective. In Britain every year 180,000 abortions take place, 87 per cent of them in the first 12 weeks. Less than 1 per cent occur after 21 weeks. Statistics don't, of course, deal with emotions. So I continued to struggle with the idea of how a woman could abort her baby in the later stages.

  I went back to the transcript of my interview with the doctor. 'If a woman comes to me at between 20 and 24 weeks pregnant and she wants a termination of pregnancy she has had a long time to think about that.' The more I thought about having to abort my foetus in the late stages, for whatever reason, I realised how hard, if not impossible, it would be to make that decision. Any woman faced with that reality would live with her decision for the rest of her life.

  I then became angry that the pro-life campaigners were using images of late-aborted foetuses. How could I, or anyone else, make a moral judgment about whether a late abortion is right or wrong without knowing the circumstances that led to that woman ending her pregnancy? The goal to isolate the foetus and make you see it as a baby is easily achieved with these images, but doing so makes us lose sight of the woman. I had easily been swept along by the emotive power of the images so no wonder the anti-abortion movement is keen for them to be shown.

  I decided to include images of 10-, 11- and 21-week-old aborted foetuses in my film because, however shocking, repulsive and confrontational they are, they represent the reality. Aborted foetuses from 10 weeks on look like tiny babies. Rationally, we know abortion ends the life of a potential human being, but why when we see what they look like are we so shocked? The pro-choice movement must know how difficult it is to fight back against the powerful image of what looks like a dead baby. So they have not engaged with these shock tactics.

  As a result, the debate in this country has become lazy. It remains as polarised today as it was in 1967, but the reality of abortion has changed. One in three women will now have an abortion during her lifetime but, more than three decades after it was made legal, abortion is still taboo. The legislation in its time was very progressive, but today it seems out of date. When I became pregnant at 21, the 1967 Act stated that to end my pregnancy I had to prove to two doctors that it presented a threat to my physical or mental health, posed a risk to my life, or that my foetus had serious abnormalities. Only if the doctors agreed could I have an abortion. The law remains the same today.

  People who know me will be surprised to hear I had an abortion. In the past it has not been something I have talked about openly. You just don't. But abortion is something that stays with you, most often as a secret, and it is not something you forget. Coming out about my abortion to a television audience was something I never thought I would do.

  After giving birth to my daughter I regained perspective on why it was important to make this film. I didn't want her, or her friends, years down the line to still have to pretend to plead insanity to end an unwanted pregnancy, or to feel it is something they couldn't talk about. I wanted to kick-start the debate and make society re-examine its views on abortion. Could we decide once and for all whether abortion in Britain should become a woman's right or, if the truth about abortion really was too horrific, allow it to continue?

  I took more than a year to make this film, and it has been a personal and very challenging journey. I met people on both sides of the debate who believed that the details of abortion should now be shown. Staff at Marie Stopes International agreed to facilitate this programme because they, like other abortion providers I talked to, believed that the secrecy around abortion had to be lifted.

  The procedure I filmed was the manual vacuum aspiration method, which sucks the foetal parts into a syringe. It is the safest technique for women with pregnancies under 12 weeks. The woman who agreed to let me film her abortion was four weeks pregnant. She chose a local anaesthetic: she was awake and talking to the doctor from start to finish, a little less than three minutes.

  I chatted to the woman before her abortion and she said we all wished this wasn't something that existed, but sometimes we found ourselves in a situation where it was necessary. Her view summed up where I found myself. For the first time in 34 years I had actually listened to a side of the debate I had previously chosen to ignore, and along the way I felt challenged, confused, angry and sad.

  I was impressed by the sincerity and conviction of the anti-abortion people I talked to. Over the past three decades the pro-choice movement in this country has lost its passion. My generation does not remember life before the 1967 Act: the desperation of having to continue an unwanted pregnancy, or the injuries and deaths associated with back-street abortions. So perhaps there is nothing to feel passionately about?

  After making my film I disagree. The foetus has been hijacked by the anti-abortion groups, forcing the pro-choice movement into defending the woman's right to choose. As someone who was, and still is, pro-choice, I too want to engage with the foetus over abortion.

  This is a difficult place for me to be right now, and I challenge the pro-choice movement to help me and others resolve the emotional contradiction that surrounds abortion when you look at the facts.
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  Snowball

  Interesting topic.

  Here in US there is a new bill making it a crime to harm a fetus in a violent act, as if it were a full person. The pro-choicers are outraged....even though the bill explicitly excludes abortion from it. Abortion sympathizers just cant seem to face up to a pre-born human as an actual person.

  I am a solid Libertarian...and am pro-choice on most everything....except abortion. A parent does NOT have the right to 'choose' to kill their children. Abortion is agression. Roe v Wade was wrong. If there is to be any sort of compromise on when life actually starts....I would say that abortion would be outright murder if there are detectable brain-waves present.