Pro-life leaders urge Church action amid UK’s largest abortion scandal

OSV News) — Pro-life campaigners have urged Britain’s Catholic bishops to speak out against pressure for abortions.

This comes after thousands of women were wrongly counseled to end their pregnancies based on a misdiagnosis of prenatal test results, prompting the largest maternity review in the history of the National Health Service, or NHS.

“These stories are heartbreaking — not just because of their gravity, but because we’re still not learning necessary lessons about the intrinsic nature of life,” said Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, co-director of March for Life U.K.

“The church must accept its own part in this terrible situation, in which clergy and lay faithful have failed to speak up — through fear, discomfort or ignorance,” she said.

The lay Catholic spoke with OSV News as new fines were imposed on NHS hospitals in Nottingham for needless baby deaths and as an inquiry into their “maternity failings” was extended because of the huge number of families affected.

A local pro-life activist said he and his wife were pressured to accept having an abortion after their unborn child was mistakenly diagnosed during prenatal tests as having a disability. He added that “deficiencies in caring for babies” was predictable in hospitals where unborn children were routinely aborted, sometimes up to birth.

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