Vultures descend on abortion case

A mother-of-three, or mother-of-five if you count all the children it appears she has conceived. has been convicted of inducing an abortion outside the legal limit using abortion pills at home she acquired by lying to abortion provider BPAS.

The BBC reported the 44-year-old was initially charged with child destruction, which she denied. She then pleaded guilty to an offence under Section 58 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.

Carla Foster was sentenced on Monday 12th June 2023 to 28 months, 14 of which will be spent in custody with the remainder out on licence.

And right on cue, the pro-abortion agitators circling around the case have descended like vultures, seizing their opportunity to make the pro-abortion case.

In fact, a trio of pro-abortion groups are planning a ‘Time to Act’ protest on Saturday 17th June at the royal Courts of Justice at 1pm. Why not be a spy and book your place (free!) ONLINE HERE. (I did!)

Careful Planning

Mrs Foster was between 32 and 34 weeks pregnant when she took medication acquired via the “pills by post” scheme introduced during lockdown, Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court heard.

Abortion is legal in England and Wales up to 24 weeks gestation. After 10 weeks the ‘procedure’ must be carried out in a clinic. The “pills by post” scheme, introduced in lockdown, allows babies up to 10 weeks to be killed at home.

Prosecutors told the court Mrs Foster had provided false information knowing she was over the time limit. She had made online searches which they said indicated ‘careful planning’.

The court heard between February and May 2020 she had searched ‘how to hide a pregnancy bump’, ‘how to have an abortion without going to the doctor’ and ‘how to lose a baby at six months’. She was well aware of how advanced she was when she told the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) she was seven weeks pregnant in order to acquire the tablets.

On 11th May 2020, having taken the abortion pills, she called 999 at 18:39 BST saying she was in labour. The baby, named Lily, was born not breathing during the phone call and was confirmed dead about 45 minutes later.

A post-mortem examination recorded Lily’s cause of death as stillbirth and maternal use of abortion drugs. She, Lily that is, was estimated to be between 32 and 34 weeks’ gestation.

Usual suspects

Almost immediately the vultures came down. Carla Foster’s conviction and imprisonment brought out the usual suspects arguing for an ‘overhaul’ of criminal abortion laws.

They ranged from MPs Caroline Nokes (Con) and Diana Johnson and Stella Creasy (Lab), the head of UK abortion giant British Pregnancy Advisory Service Ann Furedi, and radio broadcaster Iain Dale. Every one referred to abortion as ‘medical care’. They have to lie. It’s a poison.

‘Scrap this unjust verdict, scrap this law: no woman should go to prison for having an abortion’ headed Stella Creasy’s article in the Guardian: ‘The lord chancellor should intervene to commute this sentence. Women’s rights over their own bodies are under threat,’ she raged. No, just women’s supposed ‘rights’ over their baby’s life.

The Rt Hon Caroline Nokes has been a minister and now chairs the House of Commons equalities committee. She is a Privy Councillor. The Bible says:

Prov 25:5 Take away the wicked from before the king, and his throne shall be established in righteousness.

The Conservative MP told the BBC the 1861 law used to prosecute mother-of-three Carla Foster was “out of date”. Parliament should ‘debate overhauling the abortion rules’ she said.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Iain Dale began by heading: ‘Abortion jail sentences are a public scandal’. Not ‘abortion is a public scandal’ but ‘jail sentences’. He went on: ‘No one, let alone a desperate woman, should be criminalised in this manner in a 21st-century liberal society.’ By way of clarification he asserted: ‘I am certainly not arguing for abortion on demand, as some pro-abortion advisory groups do. That way lies madness.’

In Spiked-Online, right on cue, came BPAS CEO Ann Furedi, not apologising for supplying the pills but arguing for abortion on demand: ‘The imprisonment of this poor woman shows just how important it is to decriminalise abortion once and for all.’ Ms Furedi even called the judge in support: ‘As the judge himself put it: “If the medical profession considers that judges are wrong to imprison women who procure a late abortion outside the 24-week limit, then it should lobby parliament to change that law”.’

Pro-abort bodies lobbied judge

That quote Mrs Furedi gave of Mr Justice (Sir Edward) Pepperall was quite disingenuous, but what should we expect of one condemned in the Bible in these terms:

Deut 27:25 Cursed be he that taketh reward to slay an innocent person. And all the people shall say, Amen.
Prov 6:16 These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: 17 A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, …

What happened, as Sir Edward’s judgment stated, was that: ‘Unusually the court has received a letter dated 6 April 2023 from the President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Chief Executive of the Royal College of Midwives, the President of the Faculty of Sexual & Reproductive Healthcare, the President of the Faculty of Public Health, the Chair of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ Abortion Taskforce, the Clinical Lead and a Clinical Representative for the Abortion Care Guideline developed by the National Institute for Health Care Excellence, and the Co-Chair of the British Society of Adoption and Care Providers.’

Mr Justice Pepperall told Mrs Foster: ‘The letter urges a non-custodial sentence and indicates that its authors are concerned that your imprisonment might deter other women from accessing telemedical abortion services and other late-gestation women from seeking medical care or from being open and honest with medical professionals. The letter also regrets a recent increase in investigations following late-gestation deliveries, and even suggests that one of the letter’s authors might appear before the court to present their plea in person.’

Judge scathing of campaigners

His Honour was scathing about the eminent authors of the letter: ‘It would plainly not have been appropriate to have allowed any of the authors to address the court. Indeed, I consider that it would have been better if the letter had not been written at all.’

The judge went on refer to the authors, some indeed from Royal Colleges, as pro-abortion lobbyists: ‘While it provides me with some useful information about the delivery of telemedicine services, the letter also has the capacity to be seen as special pleading by those who favour wider access to abortions and is, in my judgment, just as inappropriate as it would be for a judge to receive a letter from one of the groups campaigning for more restrictive laws and which might seek to argue that it is important that the law is upheld by passing a deterrent sentence.’

His Honour concluded: ‘My duty as a judge is to apply the law as provided by Parliament and clarified by the Court of Appeal. If the medical profession considers that judges are wrong to imprison women who procure a late abortion outside the 24-week limit then it should lobby Parliament to change that law and not judges who are charged with the duty of applying the law.’

The Court of Appeal case

The judge’s reference to ‘the Court of Appeal’ needs clarification.

His Honour was referring to R v. Catt [2013] EWCA Crim 1187 which you can read here. In short, Sarah Louise Catt was sentenced to three and a half years. She had aborted her baby using the same abortifacients, mifepristone and misoprostol.

Like Carla Foster, Sarah Catt had been searching online for information about late abortions, and whether she could be charged with child destruction is she succeeded.

As the Guardian reported at the time, the 36-year-old, from Sherburn-in-Elmet, North Yorkshire, was around 40 weeks pregnant when she took the drugs she bought on the internet to induce her labour. She claimed the baby was stillborn and buried his body – but has to this day not revealed its whereabouts.

Mr Justice Cooke, sentencing her at Leeds crown court in September 2012, said the seriousness of the crime lay between manslaughter and murder. He said she would have been charged with murder if the baby had been born a few days later and she had then killed him.

He jailed Sarah Catt for eight years, which Lady Justice Rafferty reduced on appeal.

What did Lily look like?

What does a baby of 32 weeks look like? I’ll give you a clue. Like one of us. That’s why it’s a question the likes of Caroline Nokes, Diana Johnson, Stella Creasy, Iain Dale and Ann Furedi never ask. They never respond to the question, ‘What exactly is it growing in a woman’s womb?’ ‘Is it a human being? If not, then what is it?’ The psalmist knew:

Psa 139:13 For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. 15 My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. 16 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.

As did the writer of Ecclesiastes:

Eccl 11:5 As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all.

Both of them knew, three thousand years ago, without the benefit of ultrasound, that a human baby was growing in what should be the safest place on earth. The psalmist even says that was ‘me’. ‘I was made in secret’.

Each one of us, the chairman of the RCOG included, was knit together in our mother’s womb. Our inward parts and organs were all made. Our bones grew, in a way we can not even comprehend.

The Natural Childbirth Trust says: ‘At 32 weeks pregnant, your baby is about 40.5cm long and weighs about 1.6kg.’ In Imperial: 16” and 3lb 8oz.

UK abortion law is extreme

In the Telegraph, Allison Pearson reminds us how extreme the UK’s laws actually are: ‘You rarely hear this discussed, but the UK is out of step with the majority of European countries where the median time limit for abortion is just 12 weeks. Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Germany, Italy, Greece, all have a 12-week upper limit. France and Spain are slightly higher at 14 weeks.

‘Liberal Sweden is 18 weeks. Only the Netherlands has the same 24-week limit as the UK (the date when the foetus is considered viable outside the mother’s body) although, in practice, Dutch doctors apply a two-week margin of error, and stick to a time limit of 22 weeks.’

Indeed, not long ago we were reporting on tiny San Marino legalising abortion. The limit there is 12 weeks. Of course a mother is still carrying a genetically-distinct, even a tiny human being visually-recognisable on ultra-sound at that point. However, as gestational weeks turn to months, the UK is permitting abortion at a moment when that baby could live outside its mother’s womb. The Bible says:

Numb 35:33 So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.

The campaigners are right that the law needs changing, but to safeguard human life, not more easily to end it.

Age of the law

A common thread in the pro-death camp concerns the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. It is decried as ‘Victorian’ and is therefore ‘outdated’.

However, our laws against treason and murder, theft and perjury go back even further. Shall we scrap them too? As to the penalty, the law prohibits things that it does not want to happen. If not prison then what? A fine? Probation?

The common theme is soundbites coupled with a lack of reason and clarity. They dress inhumanity up as compassion. Never do they recognise that there is a second genetically-unique human being in the abortion equation, one made in the image of God:

Gen 9:6 Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.

Prayer

How many human beings, with their gifts and talents, creative abilities and skills, have never been born although conceived by the grace of God? How many have we lost and never been able to ask them:

Esther 4:14b and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?

Pray for our parliamentarians to know the scriptures and to seek after truth and life, not lies and death:

Deut 30:19 I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:

Pray against the abortion activists picking over the case for their advantage.

Matt 24:28 For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together.

Finally, while we pray against the constant pressure for decriminalisation and for abortion to remain a crime, (a crime which the Abortion Act 1967 disgracefully permits under certain easily-achieved circumstances), please pray earnestly for a UK MP to bring in a ‘heart-beat’ bill. Only then will the parameters of the debate begin to change from ‘how many weeks’ to ‘is that my fellow human being?’.

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