In the days since the exposure of how Cathy Warwick has hijacked the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) on behalf of the abortion industry, there have been several articles by pro-abortion writers defending the decriminalisation of abortion, by Ann Furedi, Eva Wiseman, Chitra Ramaswamy, Cathy Newman and Cathy Warwick herself.
Noticeably, none of those articles addresses in any way the argument that abortion is wrong because it is the killing of an innocent human being. There are many possible reasons for that silence. But there is also silence about another argument: that abortion hurts midwives too.
So what might participating in abortions do to midwives?
Virtue theory
Virtue theories can be said to express the simple concept that ‘you are what you eat’ - if you do good or bad things, you become a good or bad person respectively. Those who do wrong to others harm themselves as well their victims.
Let us take the example of the abortionist who does abortions solely or primarily for money and self-affirmation. He instrumentalises himself as a doctor by using his medical skills not to serve the higher goal of the ends of medicine but only or mostly to serve the lower goals of personal gain and satisfaction in ‘giving people what they want’. He instrumentalises his patients (both women and unborn children) by treating them not as ends in themselves but as a source of income and personal affirmation. His women-patients may in turn be instrumentalising him by using his skills not to serve the ends of medicine (eg the health of them and their babies) but in a bid to solve their personal social problems - real and serious as these may be - by ending their pregnancies and their babies’ lives.
The abortionist therefore is at the heart of a structure which negatively affects his moral character through endemic mutual instrumentalisation of the persons involved. Indeed, it can be argued that instrumentalisation is the root cause of the phenomenon of abortion. If this latter argument is true, it is therefore unsurprising that the operative person involved in abortion - the abortionist - is himself left instrumentalised.
Instrumentalisation = falsification
The effect of instrumentalisation is falsification. The abortionist ceases to be a doctor but becomes instead a hired technician; the woman ceases to be a patient or mother but becomes instead a customer or client; the health service ceases to be a restorer of health but becomes instead a social engineer. Such falsification is particularly damaging when one considers that profession of medicine and the gift of motherhood are vocations - a calling to order one's life with deep personal effect according to an adopted pattern. A vocation, if either followed or falsified, will have profound effects upon one's identity, as perceived by both others and by the person him/herself. The high nobility of the vocation of a doctor shines forth in the Hippocratic Oath and the tradition built around it which lives on today and is popularly regarded as a binding 'gold standard'.
Motherhood also, has historically been regarded with reverence, not least by the great world religions. And the provision by the state of the safety-net of a health service for all is now regarded as the sign of a moral society. As the abortionist is at the heart of a nexus of the instrumentalisation and thereby falsification of these reverenced things - this nexus being a 'structure of sin' known as the 'culture of death' - it can be assumed that his/her moral character is thereby negatively affected.
The "walking wounded"
There are many besides doctors who are closely implicated in abortion. Dr Rachel McNair, an American researcher into the effect of abortion on abortion centre staff, quotes the following comment from one worker: “I saw two types of women working at the clinic. One group were women who had found some way to deal with the emotional and spiritual toll of working abortion. The second group were women who had closed themselves off emotionally. They were the walking wounded. You could look in their eyes, and see that they were emotionally dead.”
These women came up against the reality of abortion as killing. Judith Feltrow, a former abortion centre worker, said: "There is a great difference between the intellectual support of the woman’s right to choose and the actual participation in the carnage of abortion."
Dr Trevor Stammers, formerly a senior lecturer in general practice at St George's University Hospital, London, has said: "I know of obstetricians who have been doing abortions for many years who have broken down saying they cannot carry on any more. Despite all attempts at emotional neutrality, the heart does not work that way when you get a baby in front of you that colleagues on another floor of the same building would be trying to keep alive. [It is] extremely upsetting…for the doctors."
Help us reach out to midwives
We therefore have good reason to fear that the moral characters of midwives will also be negatively affected by participation in abortion. Help SPUC reach out to midwives to save them from the life- and soul-destroying abortion industry.
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