Following pressure from the UK’s two largest abortion providers, the BBC Action Line, which has been featured after the TV series Call The Midwife, now refers onto a page which links women on directly to the services of the UK’s two largest private abortion providers.
These private abortion clinics only provide abortions, they do not provide practical support for women who may want to continue their pregnancies. There is no reference on this page to services that offer practical support for women who wish to continue their pregnancies.
It is likely that the UK’s largest private abortion providers will directly benefit financially from this decision as they will see more referrals to their abortion clinics.
This decision follows a longstanding institutional bias in the BBC towards the abortion lobby’s position on this issue. For a number of years now the BBC’s ‘News Style Guide’ has required their journalists to ‘Avoid pro-abortion, and use pro-choice instead’. When it comes to describing the pro-life position they advise journalists to ‘use anti-abortion rather than pro-life’.
The BBC has also been caught suppressing polling they commissioned for the Abortion on Trial documentary, which showed that there was no widespread support for scrapping the current abortion laws in the UK. Instead in the documentary that aired, they cherry-picked the minority of results from the polling that supported what appeared to be a clear bias in the documentary towards removing current legal restrictions and safeguards around abortion. The same documentary was also criticised for dropping a pregnant woman from their panel who had chosen not to abort her daughter who had Down’s syndrome.
More recently the BBC has also been criticised for referring to late-term abortions as ‘stillbirths’.
Right To Life UK spokesperson Clare McCarthy said:
“It is very disappointing to see that the BBC have given in to tactics from abortion pressure groups to further skew their coverage on this issue towards a position that suits the abortion lobby’s interests.
The UK’s two largest abortion providers, who lobbied for this change, will now likely directly benefit financially from this decision, as they will now see more referrals to their abortion clinics. UK taxpayers already spend tens of millions of pounds each year on funding these private abortion clinics, now they are seeing their TV licence fee being used for the BBC to hijack a prime time TV series to provide more business for these private abortion clinics.
This decision leaves women watching Call the Midwife who are facing an unplanned pregnancy and looking for more information with only one option for them and their baby, abortion. The two abortion providers referred to by the BBC Action Line only provide abortions, they do not provide practical support for women who may want to continue their pregnancies. There is no reference on this page to services that offer practical support for women who wish to continue their pregnancies.
We are calling on the BBC to now provide links to services on their BBC action line which provide non-directional counselling and real practical support for women facing an unplanned pregnancy, such as those provided by the charity Life.”
ENDS
- For additional quotes and media interviews contact 07847 454108 or email press@righttolife.org.uk