TV ads will encourage more abortions, says cardinal
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- Published on Wednesday, 25 January 2012 15:44
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has accused regulators of “encouraging abortions” by allowing private clinics to attract business through TV and radio advertisements.
The cardinal severely criticised the Advertising Standards Authority for loosening the rules to allow clinics which carry out abortions for profit to advertise their services through the broadcast media.
He said the move, introduced under pressure from the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP), would lead only to an increase in the numbers of abortions in a nation already shamed by a high rate of terminations.
“I utterly oppose anything that leads to more abortions,” said Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, the Emeritus Archbishop of Westminster.
“We have 200,000 a year,” he said. “This seems to be encouraging more people to have abortions and I think that’s a terrible thing.”
He added that it was vitally important for Christians to do all they could to oppose the deregulation.
“Anything we can do to influence public opinion and to influence the Government we should do it,” he said.
The cardinal spoke after delivering a sermon on Christian unity to nearly 700 people gathered in Chester’s Anglican cathedral (see page 7).
In his homily he also urged Christians to persevere in defending human life from conception until natural death.
“Time and time again, together, we must proclaim, in season and out of season, the dignity of the human person made in the image of God from conception to the end of life,” the cardinal said.
Encouraging the faithful to withstand the pressure of aggressive secularism, he added that Christians must also assert that “all that is implied in our belief in God is alive, active and relevant in today’s secular society”.
Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor has been a frequent critic of Britain’s abortion laws. In 2006 he met Patricia Hewitt, then Labour’s health secretary, in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the Government to give MPs a free vote on lowering the upper time limit of 24 weeks for abortions.
The changes in the advertising rules on abortion are also understood to be opposed by the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, but he is unable to over-ride the independent advertising regulator.
The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children said the decision would “only serve the abortion industry’s money-spinning trade which hurt women through killing their unborn children”.
And LIFE spokesman Mark Bhagwandin added: “Our principal concern about advertising abortion services is to do with the normalisation of what is, by any measure, a serious procedure.
“Whatever one’s opinion of abortion, the fact is that it ends the life of an existing human individual and we ought therefore to resist any measure that tends to trivialise it, or to make it appear as inconsequential as other consumer choices.”
