A British group has claimed that the
legalization of gay marriage will increase the nation's abortion
rate.
The Society for the Protection of
Unborn Children makes the claim both on its website and in leaflets
it has been distributing.
“We must protect real marriage
because it protects children in the womb,” the leaflet states.
“Statistics show that unborn babies are four to five times more
likely to be aborted outside of real marriage.”
The Vice.com's Jamie Lee Curtis Taete
gave the group a call.
“Now, the issue there is that
marriage as the ideal set up for conceiving, bearing, raising
children, has been undermined in a number of ways in recent years,”
a representative explained to Taete. “Things like withdrawing
fiscal benefits from married couples, creating virtual equivalents
for cohabiting relationships, introducing no fault divorce
proceedings, and so on; all these kind of changes have tended to say
that marriage, in the conventional sense, is less important to us.
You are not entitled to a privileged status by law and in society.”
The representative clarified that
he/she was talking about civil partnerships, available in Britain to
only gay and lesbian couples.
“I think there's a strong argument to
say that civil partnerships also contributed to weakening real
marriage.”
The British government announced
earlier this year that it would legalize gay nuptials by 2015.
When Taete pointed out that the
abortion rate had risen in only one of the five countries where such
unions have been legal for five or more years, the representative
answered: “Right.”
“Right. Well … I don't think
anybody would expect any difference after five years. That's no time
at all to make a judgment.”
“Well, it's been legal since 2001 in
the Netherlands, so that's quite a long time,” Taete
offered.
“Eleven years is not a huge amount of
time to expect a big rise in the abortion rate. … When people do
get married, the whole legal structure built around the child-rearing
nature of marriage is removed. That may have consequences for the
unborn, because the unborn, when it comes to the weakening of the
definition of marriage, suffer most.”
“You change things in a radical way,
and where it's most harmful is the womb,” the representative
asserted.