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Saturday, 04 May 2019 20:11

The 'Christian' abortionist who wants to destigmatize abortion

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Taken outside the office of abortionist Dr Carole Portman Taken outside the office of abortionist Dr Carole Portman Photo credit: Graham Preston
The abortion industry is well-known for its reliance on understatements and misrepresentation of fact in order to make its poisonous service more palatable to the public. One such euphemism is the term 'abortion stigma'. This handy term simultaneoulsy normalises abortion and derides those who believe in the sanctity of human life. 'Abortion stigma' suggests that there is nothing inherently wrong with the practice of abortion, but that any negatives involved are due to the shame projected onto women from pro-lifers, and particularly those Christians who believe that abortion is a grave sin. Even post-abortion syndrome is often cast as being a reaction to 'abortion stigma', rather than the regret and grief that human beings naturally feel after they have taken the life of their offspring.
 
Dr Carol Portman is one Australian abortionist who is open about trying to 'de-stigmatise' abortion. She stated in March this year that she wants to 'bring abortion into the mainstream.' Portman continued with:

It's part of women's health care, and it should be talked about so women get the best advice and don't feel they are marginalised or that their actions disgust people.

Well, good luck with that one, Doctor. It is humanly impossible not to be disgusted by the act of abortion. Further, it appears to be lost on this woman that it's possible to lovingly support women who are grieving from an abortion but to also feel disgust at the action of killing children. It is possible to separate the sinner from the sin. But when there's no sense of sin, then the legitimate shame that we are supposed to feel when we behave badly morphs into an overwhelming heaviness that either threatens to suffocate us or is fashioned into a weapon made ready to strike at the innocent. And in the hands of an unrepentant abortionist, that weapon is usually aimed at the pro-life community.

'We know it's a baby' 

Dr Portman is one of the growing number of abortion advocates who readily admit that abortion kills babies. [See our article, '16 times abortion advocates admitted that abortion kills babies.'] Having misled abortion-minded women for decades, by claiming at their businesses, in their literature and in public statements that a fetus is 'only tissue', a 'clump of cells', or 'not really alive', these advocates now more commonly state that, yes, it is a baby that is being killed, but the mother's human rights trump the those of her children.

 
To illustrate the nonchalance with which the idea of killing babies is accepted among medical professionals, Graham Preston reported on the following incident which took place in Brisbane, Australia earlier this year.
 
On Wednesday 17 April I attended an event at QUT put on by the groups, Australian Centre for Health Law Research, and Health, Ethics and Law (HEAL)). The guest speaker was Cairns abortionist Professor Caroline de Costa and there was also a panel discussion involving Ms Tracy Pickett, Dr Glenn Gardener (a Maternal Fetal Medicine specialist at the Mater hospital) and abortionist Dr Carol Portman, on the legal and ethical issues around implementing Queensland’s abortion reforms.

When the question time came I managed to get in first and asked the panel the following: “Just when was it conclusively established that abortion does not destroy the life of a child?” They all looked a bit stunned and hesitated to answer so I took the opportunity to point out that the Queensland Criminal Code, the Termination of Pregnancy Act 2018, and the new Queensland Human Rights Act 2019, all acknowledge that the entity carried by a pregnant woman is a “child”.

When Brisbane abortionist, Carol Portman, took the microphone she readily conceded that she does not dispute that abortion kills babies. She said that just that day she had a woman come in who wanted an abortion. Dr Portman said that the woman recognised that she was carrying a baby and that she herself, Dr Portman, recognised the woman was carrying a baby. Nevertheless Dr Portman was willing to give her the abortion.

None of the panel members expressed any contrary view to that of Dr Portman’s.

There were maybe 70 – 80 people present and none them appeared to blink an eyelid that there was a person sitting right in front of them who openly and unrepentantly confessed, on her own terms, to killing babies. Incredible. Sickening.
 
She has also admitted that she does abortions on women whom she thinks may be being coerced to have the abortion. [More on this below.]

'God gave me these gifts'

Dr Portman also claims to be a Christian and took part in an SBS program about contemporary Christians in Australia. As she told the ABC:

"How God may judge me is in the back of my mind. But I believe that I am doing the appropriate and right things, and I am hoping that's how I will be judged. I also believe that only God can judge me."

While it's true that only God can judge a person's heart and their ultimate destination after death, all people are called to rightly judge actions, and actually have an obligation to do so. If no actions were ever judged as being right or wrong, then our legal system would not exist, and rape, theft and fraud would not be crimes. This misrepresentation of the nature of judging has been co-opted by many progressive causes and is being effectively used to silence Christians. A bitter irony is now embedded in our culture which has no qualms when it comes to judging Christians - even to the point of considering it to be obligatory - but which also claims that it's 'not Christian' to judge.  And this failure to judge actions has led, among other things, to an explosion in the number of abortions, both within and outside marriages.

As a doctor, Carol Portman knows better than anyone how stressful and disorienting a crisis pregnancy can be, whether it was unplanned or is due to a feotal abnormality. She also believes she has a certain insight as to how common these situations are:

"I also wanted to make clear that you can be a person of faith — whether that's Christian, Jewish, Muslim, agnostic or anything else — and still find yourself in a circumstance where you might have to make a difficult decision. And I am there to support that decision, whatever it may be."

But Dr Portman is merely acknowledging what the pro-life community has known for years: that any woman, from any background, can find herself facing an unplanned pregnancy. The difference is that, while prolifers will offer a woman the concrete help she requires to continue her pregnancy, this medical doctor - who was trained to defend life at all costs - will attempt to dispose of the problems by disposing of one of her patients. The patient in the womb, that is.

How strange then, when Dr Portman claims she is not opposed to pro-lifers offering help to women outside abortion facilities. She said,

"If someone wants to stand there and ask, "Can I help you, do you need money, do you need food, what can we do so that you don't need to consider an abortion", those are great people. Fantastic. They are trying to support women by giving them options that may provide alternatives."
Surely, if she really did care about the long-term welfare of her pregnant patients, Dr Portman would refer those in crisis to pregnancy support centres or pro-life groups? But instead, she is quite happy to terminate tiny lives in the name of God, believing that God 'gave her these gifts'. Dr Portman is also strongly in favour of exclusion-zones, which stop the very pro-lifers she claims to support from engaging with abortion-minded women and offering them help.
 

'They are being coerced'

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of all this is that Dr Portman has readily admitted to performing abortions on women who don't really want one. [See our article, 'Abortion Coercion Admitted.']
 
In 2018, Portman told QLD’s Parliamentary Hearing into abortion law reform:
 
“Sometimes even in the best of circumstances we understand that a person is to a degree being coerced but feel they still need to go ahead.. because it’s their only choice, because otherwise this person will leave them, and their 4 kids (for example).    it’s very hard to know what to do in those circs so you go ahead with what their choice is even though to a degree they are being coerced. 
 
In her article exposing Dr Portman’s shocking work ethic, Debbie Garratt said, "In the same hearing, the Director of Marie Stopes, Philip Goldstone states that his organisation is currently working to develop tools to assess for coercion.  I have to wonder for what purpose, when it appears to make no difference whether consent is free or coerced anyway.”

To destigmatize abortion or to destigmatize stigma?

Carol Portman has made her own the directives of the abortion industry's ideologues and is trying to normalise this grim and bloody 'choice.'. She has become another mouthpiece for organisations, such as the pro-abortion, INROADS.org, who define abortion stigma as the 'social process of devaluing those people who have had abortions or those associated with abortion. Stigma leads to the social, medical and legal marginalization of abortion worldwide.'

But what if abortion stigma was actually an appropriate response to the reality of child-killing? What if society actually has more of a problem with babies than with abortion? Maybe we need to turn the definition on its head?

"Fetal stigma is a social process or devaluing those people who are inside the womb or those associated with carrying them. Stigma leads to the social, medical and legal marginalization of the fetus worldwide."

Kathy Clubb

Founder and Editor of The Freedoms Project

Kathy has been active in pro-life work for 6 years and was involved in a constitutional challenge to Victoria’s exclusion-zone laws. She is the Melbourne co-ordinator for Family Life International and is a member of the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants. Kathy began writing about pro-life and Catholic issues at Light up the Darkness.net but broadened her range of topics as she came to learn more about the many threats to freedom which are common to all Christians.

Kathy home-educates her youngest 6 children and considers her family to be her most important pro-life work.