Did anyone else see Nadine Dorries’s parliamentary adjournment debate last night on the information that’s provided to women seeking abortions, or as she’s disingenuously taken to calling it, on a “woman’s right to informed consent”?
If you didn’t, and you’re now regretting having missed it, fear not, you can watch it by clicking here
Likewise, you can catch up on what she said by reading the transcript here.
Now I’m not planning to examine in detail everything that Dorries said during her speech (feel free to have at it in the comments though), firstly because I’m liable to get too ranty for my own and indeed anyone else’s good, and secondly because I’d hate to be accused of stalking her, as so many others who’ve gone before me have .
There’s one thing she talked about however that I do want to examine a bit more closely, and that’s this:
“I shall finish by mentioning a book which is to be launched this month. It is published by the charity Forsaken, which is neither pro-life nor pro-choice: it is pro-women. For two years, the charity has put together the stories of women suffering from post-abortion syndrome. Reading the book is so heart-wrenching that we just want to reach out and take their pain away, but we cannot. There is no going back. We cannot make it better; abortion is a procedure to end life-it is final.”
“Hmmm, Forsaken”, I thought when I heard her mention the charity last night, “I’ll have to look them up tomorrow”.
Of course I didn’t think to write it down, and when I got up this morning I’d completely forgotten the bloody name of the organisation, so I had to wait a bit for the Hansard stuff to go up. But then, after a fairly fruitless online search for Forsaken I logged on to Twitter this afternoon and discovered I wasn’t the only one trying to find our more about this mysterious, hitherto unheard of charity.
So now, thanks to medavep‘s sterling detective work, it can be revealed that this is the organisation Dorries was referring to last night.
Is it just me, or is there a bit of a disconnect between Dorries’s statement that Forsaken is “neither pro-life nor pro-choice: it is pro-women“, and the organisation’s website, which not only parps on incessantly about the unproven, designed-to-guilt-trip-women-even-more, made up ailment, “post abortion syndrome,” but which links through to both Care Confidential (“run by the charity Christian Action Research and Education (Care), whose charitable aims, as listed with the Charity Commission, are: “The advancement and propagation of the Christian Gospel and in particular Christian teachings as it bears on or affects national and individual morality and ethics.”) and ARCH (who run the Silent No More campaign, one of whose stated goals is to “Educate the public that abortion is harmful emotionally, physically and spiritually with lasting consequences“)
I suspect that once more Dorries is being slightly less than straight with the truth here, because that really doesn’t look much like a non-aligned organisation to me, in fact it looks decidedly pro-life. Whatever, I’m sure all will be revealed soon enough.
Another thing that did strike me about Dorries’s speech though was this little snippet:
“Reading the book is so heart-wrenching that we just want to reach out and take their pain away, but we cannot.”
And from the Forsaken website:
“It is heart-wrenching, and you may feel an overwhelming desire to hold them and take away their pain.”
Lol. Still, originality’s never exactly been Dorries’s forté has it?
