'The BBC will make broadcasting history when it runs a live two-hour show from an abortion clinic, it has been revealed.
Victoria Derbyshire, one of Radio 5 Live's top presenters, will interview patients and staff at an as yet unnamed clinic. The programme is due to be aired next month and is likely to feature conversations with women set to undergo terminations.
The show comes after a series of high-profile attempts by hackers to bring down the websites of abortion clinics and jeopardise their work. Since early March there have been at least 2,500 attempts to hack into the British Pregnancy Advisory Service's website with a third of those in the cyber-attack traced to computers in North America and a third to Russia.
James Jeffery, 27, was jailed for two years and eight months recently for stealing about 10,000 personal records of women held by BPAS. Derbyshire told the Independent: 'We have asked an abortion clinic for permission to broadcast and they have agreed. 'We appreciate the sensitivity around it and I would hope listeners would trust us to do it carefully.'
She added that the show would 'give us an insight into an area of British life which is taboo'. Last month an undercover investigation revealed doctors at some abortion clinics were illegally allowing women to have terminations just because they wanted a baby of the opposite sex.
The Government told the Care Quality Commission to urgently investigate 320 abortion clinics and it has since emerged up to a fifth may be breaking the law. While visiting the clinics the watchdog’s inspectors found doctors were signing off consent forms for women to have abortions despite knowing nothing of their circumstances. Doctors are meant to have either seen patients in person or at the very least read their medical records.
A spokesman for the Prolife Alliance said that she felt the programme should not be aired. 'I think it will promote abortion more and trivialise it even more and show how easy the process is. 'We oppose all abortion but we would like to see a more robust implementation of the law. I think it will inevitably just promote the clinic that's doing it and will trivialise the issue even more.'
She added: 'This is the abortion lobby fighting back and if you do get on the websites you will find promotions that show how squeaky clean it all is, but this doesn't sound like cutting edge journalism. It's more like advertorial product placement.'
Darinka Aleksic, campaign co-ordinator at Abortion Rights said: 'We welcome the news that Radio 5 Live is planning to broadcast from an abortion provider. There is so much scaremongering and misinformation about abortion, in the media and especially online, that any move to destigmatise the procedure is a step forward.
'Provided it is handled sensitively, then this could be a useful way to let women know about the reality of abortion: that it is a safe, legal and common medical procedure. 'It's not about trivialising the issue – no woman takes the decision to have an abortion lightly. It's about letting people know that if they experience an unplanned pregnancy, abortion is one option open to them. 'One in three women will need to have an abortion at some point in her life, yet the issue is shrouded in so much shame and secrecy that it can be very hard for them to talk openly about.
Anything we can do to reduce that stigma is to be welcomed.' Last week it was revealed that women will soon be able to have the morning-after pill delivered by courier to their office. A 'pill-by-bike' emergency contraception service is being launched in London to save women from visiting their GP or waiting for the post to arrive. This is the first time the morning-after pill will be delivered to the door like a business contract, with the service prompted by customer demand. Women will be asked to fill out a form online and confirm they are 18 or over. The form is assessed by a doctor, with the pill delivered up to two hours later on a normal working day, although it may be possible to order online overnight and book a time for delivery the next day.'
St George, please pray for the BBC.
5 comments:
I'll be interested to see if all those interviewed will be uniformly "no regrets" women. Not suggesting they'll be cherrypicked, of course. Only that those who do have regrets are not likely to want to be interviewed.
OMG, murder in the bath, murder in your kitchen sink, and just don't these people lie, and lie, and lie again and the public just takes it!
This spokewoman alone contradicts every smoothie softsell of babymurder I remember in 67.
Murder will out, but what guarantee do we have that by then Divine providence has not permitted, say, the beginning of a millenial reign of the federated islamic republic of Europe?
No sense of reporting on what actually happens in such places - the organised violent killings of innocent defenceless babies in their mothers' wombs, on a mass scale, for money. It is the opposite of medicine, it is extreme evil. The BBC ought to show a baby being violently killed, and the battered, cut up or burned bodies of those little baby boys and girls. That would be reporting the truth, and save many babies and mothers from the horror which doesn't end on the day of the killing. Unless it is going to do this, it will be a propaganda scam for the abortion "industry" and lobby. Pray for the demise of this rampant evil force.
Looking around the internet I found these interesting quotes:
Andrew Marr in 2006 said this:
"The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias".
And Mark Thompson the DG said this in 2007. He's trying to talk in the past but its not very convincing:
"In the BBC I joined 30 years ago, there was, in much of current affairs, in terms of people's personal politics, which were quite vocal, a massive bias to the left. The organisation did struggle then with impartiality."
Mark Thompson it seems is a Catholic but undoubtedly of the liberal variety. I know somebody who worked on the production side of their news and is a Catholic who met him a few times at staff gatherings. He told me he was total liberal and also gutless.
The quotes come from this wiki page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#cite_note-dm-22
BJC
Do let us know if you find out when it will be aired!
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