It is hard to say from George Caruana's letter (December 5) whether he favours abortion or not. On one hand, Mr Caruana deceptively adopts the pro-life position claiming that he would do all he can to prevent an abortion, yet, later in his misdirected contribution to this paper, he presents arguments that clearly contradict.
To begin with, there is no activity in the world that has ever become more common once it was criminalised. On the other hand, keeping something illegal, as in the case of the constitutional campaign, will obviously keep numbers down. By his arguments, Mr Caruana will have us believe that if the government made illegal drugs legal and subsidised the cost of them by covering them under medical insurance, the amount of drugs consumed used would not go up.
The WHO of today is the largest pro-abortion institution on the planet, shamelessly abusing of its considerable resources in order to promote abortion by all possible means. It is impossible to reliably estimate the number of abortions carried out in Latin America when the whole procedure is shrouded in secrecy. Nonetheless, the WHO, and others, pull numbers out of thin air and attempt to gloss them with a veneer of authenticity by citing mysterious "medical authorities" as their sources.
Needless to say, these "authorities" are invariably diehard abortionists whose fabrications have been exposed on countless occasions but who pop up like bad pennies whenever an unobtainable statistic is called for. The data they cite on abortions in Latin America is as reliable as an estimate of the illegal drug deals carried out in that part of the world or, for that matter, in any large city.
The problem with using WHO statistics is that they simply cannot be substantiated in any way. Joseph Chamie, former head of the UN statistics department, says that most countries simply do not keep statistics. Many countries, he said, do not even report the sex of the person who has died let alone the cause of death. At the end of October, WHO reported that close to two-thirds of deaths remain unreported in national statistics. WHO said: "Only 31 of the 193 states have reliable cause-of-death statistics".
The surgical abortion rate in Europe does, admittedly, appear to be lower than in, say, the United States. Once again, however, these figures have been mauled in order to make them fit the fiction - no mention is made of the fact that the abortion pill and the morning-after pill severely limit the figures for surgical abortions, from a purely numerical perspective.
Worse still, the numbers quoted are derived exclusively from hospital data, with no reference whatsoever to the immensely significant numbers of abortions carried out in private offices. Indeed, in an interview on Maltese TV recently, Rebecca Gomperts herself casually admitted that she does not keep statistics of the number of aborted babies she handled, while claiming that the Netherlands had the lowest abortion rates in all of Europe.
Consider these statistics taken from reliable and official medical records of a legal procedure. The numbers invariably go up very quickly as people take up this legal option. In the US, abortion was legalised in January of 1973 and that year their were 615,831 abortions reported; in 1974 a total of 780,824 abortions were reported and 864,682 in 1975. The numbers continued growing until peaking, now exceeding over 1.4 million annually.
The same trend was seen in the United Kingdom where abortion was legalised in 1967.
That year their were 27,200 abortions recorded, by 1969 there were 56,819, in 1970 it went up to 86,565 peaking at 201,173 abortions in 2006.
Though the majority of members in the pro-life movement are in fact women, the recognition that abortion kills a human being is not exclusively a woman's prerogative.
Research statistics are all freely obtainable from the following links http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/ab-unitedstates.html and http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/ab-ukenglandwales.html.