In this episode, I speak to pro-life advocate and author, Dr. Rachel Ward, about abortion. We discuss the difference between late term and early term abortions, the pros and cons of abortion at different stages of pregnancy, and the benefits and disadvantages of different types of abortion options.
00:00:23.020So, like I say, there's 200,000 abortions in the UK every year, and at most 100 are because the mother's life is at risk.
00:00:30.640So it's a tiny percentage of, a tiny fraction of 1%.
00:00:34.080Even when you look at those abortions, some of them still say they're for mental health, where having an abortion isn't going to save a woman's life for mental health reasons.
00:00:43.980One of them was even done for high blood cholesterol.
00:00:47.020Like, it's really not something that is life-threatening.
00:00:49.840Now, there are situations, very rarely, where you do have to deliver the baby early to save the woman's life.
00:00:57.540So if the woman has an infection in her uterus, if the woman has particularly high blood pressure as a result of the pregnancy, in many of those situations, you have to deliver the baby.
00:01:09.980And if you do that before the baby is viable, then, of course, the baby will pass away as a result.
00:01:14.920No one wants that to happen, but that's what you have to do medically to save the woman's life.
00:01:19.000Now, some people call that an abortion.
00:03:29.320Occasionally, at a later stage, the baby might survive it and live outside of the womb for a little bit, but then usually passes away because it's not supported.
00:03:38.620At six weeks, the baby survives outside of the womb for a little bit?
00:03:43.040It would probably be exceedingly rare.
00:03:45.280So there have been a couple of studies.
00:03:47.260This is where, actually, they get the brainwave statistic from because at six weeks, the baby would be – this study was from miscarried babies.
00:05:01.560So the way this is done typically is that they get an injection, they put it through the mother's tummy, and they would inject usually potassium chloride straight into the baby's heart, sometimes into somewhere else.
00:05:13.800But I think usually they would aim for the heart.
00:05:17.360Now, this chemical, potassium chloride, is used in very low concentrations in medicine all the time.
00:05:23.240So it's not the fact that they use it.
00:05:24.760But at the sort of high concentrations to kill someone, human rights groups all over the world have protested against this when it comes to capital punishment.
00:05:35.060So say there's, like, a rapist or a murderer who's on death row, you will get all the human rights groups in the world saying you cannot use these high concentrations of potassium chloride because it's excruciating, it's torture, it's just so painful, no one should ever go through that, not even murderers and rapists.
00:05:52.560Now, that exact same chemical is used, and I should say that vets don't use it for putting down animals either.
00:06:02.520How do they know it's painful if they die?
00:06:06.360To be honest, I don't know exactly how they know.
00:06:08.000I guess they would have done it in some cases and they, you know, it doesn't kill people immediately, right?
00:06:13.660So this is a big problem with euthanasia stuff is that, you know, often actually it doesn't kill the person or the animal straight away and there's a lot of suffering first.
00:06:22.560And so I assume they've, you know, had those sort of bad situations before.
00:06:28.900So, yeah, they would normally have to do foeticide first at a late stage so that the baby comes out dead.
00:06:34.940Because if you don't do foeticide after about 20 weeks, if the baby comes out, it might live and you'll have to take care of it.
00:06:43.280And, of course, that's against the point of the abortion.
00:06:46.400So just finally then on to clarify about the early stage, in the early stages, say like 10 weeks or so, if you do the abortion pills and the baby survives, which is rare, but it could happen, it could only really survive if you put it into like a salt solution.
00:07:03.360It couldn't survive on its own at a really early stage.
00:07:46.140And so then the girl is just like at home and it just like comes out.
00:07:50.380Well, yeah, so this has been one of the big concerns about medical or chemical abortion, because this is something that has, you know, it's only become really mainstream in the last 10 to 20 years.
00:08:00.640So before that, you know, 50 years ago, abortions pretty much had to be surgical.
00:08:05.200They had a few other ways of doing it, but it was generally surgery.
00:08:08.780Whereas now they have the abortion pills.
00:08:10.820And so there's been a lot of, you know, concern about these for various reasons.
00:08:14.940One of them is a big court case in the U.S.
00:08:17.280But one of the concerns is that if women are going home and having these pills at home and they're basically having a miscarriage at home and aborting their baby at home, you know, it's not like a surgical abortion where the doctor takes out all of the baby and removes it and hides it from the woman, because that's what they're told to do is hide it because it's clearly a baby.
00:08:36.760In a medical abortion, the woman has to do it herself and see the baby.
00:08:41.580Now, sometimes if it's very small or there's a lot of blood or whatever, they won't see it.
00:08:46.080And so you'll get some people say, oh, I had a medical abortion and it was just like a blood clot.
00:09:55.180So you still get surgical abortions now and they can be done at any time up until, like, the third, you know, to the end of the second trimester, roughly.
00:10:02.820So at an early stage, they would use a vacuum.
00:10:06.700So this can be manual or it can be an electric one.
00:10:09.600They would basically vacuum out the embryo or baby.
00:10:12.860And the force of the vacuum is what kind of destroys the baby in that situation.