The British Medical Association’s vote to decriminalise abortion has been slammed by Andrea Williams, chief executive of Christian Concern.
Earlier this summer, the British Medical Association (BMA) held a vote at its annual meeting, in which it voted in favour of decriminalising abortion. As a result, the organisation will adopt a pro-abortion stance as its official policy, and lobby the government to remove all legal restrictions on abortion.
Ms Williams called the vote ‘a shocking disrespect for human life. This debate and vote had no public mandate. Recent polling shows only 1 per cent of women want to legalise abortion up to birth. Some 70 per cent of women want the current limit of 24 weeks to be lowered, and 91 per cent desire an explicit ban on gender-abortion’.
The vote comes 50 years after the 1967 Abortion Act set strict limits on when abortions are allowed (up to 24 weeks), except in cases where it was necessary to save the life of the mother, or there was extreme foetal abnormality or a grave risk of physical or mental injury to the woman.
Ms Williams added: ‘A tiny minority of activists have imposed their extreme abortion agenda on the BMA and as a result have severely damaged the institution’s reputation.
‘The mark of a civilised society is how it treats the most vulnerable. Rather than protecting pre-born children in their mothers’ wombs, the BMA has chosen to be complicit in their destruction.
‘Those who are tasked with healing the sick have voted to kill the healthy. When our doctors display such a shocking disrespect for human life, we know we are a society in crisis’.
