Outrage over failure to prosecute doctors for sex selection abortions reaches new heights

It has not been an easy two weeks for Keir Starmer (pictured), the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

When it emerged on 4 September that the Crown Prosecution Service, which he heads, would not be bringing charges against two doctors who had been caught authorising abortions purely on grounds of gender, the outrage was immediate.

Within hours the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said that sex selection abortions were ‘completely unacceptable’ and called for the Attorney General Dominic Grieve to seek an ‘urgent clarification’ about the decision.

The following day Lord Macdonald, the former DPP, described the decision as ‘very dubious’ and amounted to letting doctors ‘avoid criminal action’ because of their professional status - undermining the basic principle that ‘everyone is equal under the law’.

The CPS then made the situation worse by arguing that it was down to doctors to ‘interpret the law’ and that they had ‘wide discretion’ to assess whether a termination is legal or not. Although there was enough evidence to bring a prosecution it was not in the public interest to do so, they claimed. The matter was more appropriately a matter for the General Medical Council (GMC).

This led the GMC to distance itself from the CPS’s decision, insisting that, as a professional regulator, it should not be seen as a ‘substitute’ for the criminal justice system and is not there to ‘punish doctors’.

Emily Thornberry, Labour shadow attorney general, then wrote to the DPP to request an urgent review of the decision. She cut right to the heart of the issues at stake (full text here):

‘The GMC is a regulator and cannot bring criminal proceedings. The provisions of the Abortion Act 1967 are crystal clear. The conduct of abortions for reasons not stated in that Act is a criminal offence, not just a regulatory one. To decide not prosecute because a regulator can hear the matter instead is to disapply the law and undermine the will of Parliament.’

David Burrowes, a Tory member of the all-party parliamentary Pro-Life Group, then raised the issue in the Commons. He said: ‘There is urgent need for a statement to clarify whether the restrictions on choice in the Abortion Act are now meaningless.’

This led to the Prime Minister expressing concern in response to a parliamentary question from Tory MP Nadine Dorries.

Mr Cameron praised The Daily Telegraph for highlighting ‘this important case’ and said it was ‘absolutely right’ that the doctors could face ‘professional’ consequences.

This weekend 50 MPs supported the Health Secretary’s call for the matter to be urgently investigated.

In a letter to the Daily Telegraph they called the decision a ‘step back in the fight for gender equality’ and accused the DPP of usurping parliament’s role:

‘The decision by the CPS could lead to the conclusion that gender-specific abortion is merely a matter of professional misconduct rather than illegal. This is clearly unconstitutional as it is for Parliament to legislate to change the law, and it has occurred without recourse to Parliament. Safeguards in the 1967 Abortion Act need to be properly applied and enforced. Doctors are not above the law and the General Medical Council cannot be a substitute for the courts.’

Other critics have accused the DPP of ‘double standards’ over abortion laws and operating a policy ‘worthy of Alice in Wonderland’.

Last Friday the Christian Legal Centre said it was preparing for a private prosecution against the two doctors.

‘We are preparing for a private prosecution or judicial review, but we may do both,’ said chief executive Andrea Williams. ‘We will not let the matter go.’

I was asked to comment and said to the Telegraph that if the CPS won’t do its job then concerned citizens will step in. The CPS was giving the message that people wanting sex-selective abortions should come to Britain and that if the law is not upheld it will be increasingly flouted by unscrupulous people.

By failing to act the DPP has signalled that Britain is open for business as far as sex selection abortions are concerned. 

I can’t ever recall any issue related to abortion uniting those across the political spectrum in the way this has done. It has brought prolife activists and prochoice feminist factions together in an extraordinary way resulting in Keir Starmer attracting the wrath of all sides.

Now all the heat is on the DPP to explain fully why he has not upheld the will of parliament. We are all waiting.

What will it take for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) actually to prosecute someone for assisted suicide?

The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer, whose job it is to prosecute people who break the law, announced last Friday that he did not consider it to be in the public interest to bring a case against former GP Michael Irwin (pictured), for assisting the suicide of pancreatic cancer sufferer Ray Cutkelvin in 2006.

It was not that he lacked evidence to do so. Irwin had literally begged the DPP to put him away so that he could become a martyr for the pro-euthanasia movement. He had even provided documentary evidence of his involvement in terms of a £1,500 payment towards paying for Cutkelvin's visit to the Dignitas Suicide facility in Zurich.

In fact, Irwin, previously chairman of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society (now euphemistically rebranded Dignity in Dying) has helped no less than nine people kill themselves, and had even been struck off by the General Medical Council in 2005 for a past attempt.

But nonetheless, the DPP judged that although he had clearly done the deed, it was not in the public interest to make him stand trial.

His justification for this was that Irwin’s case did not fulfil enough of the 22 ‘prosecution criteria’ that he had made public at the request of the Supreme Court ruling on the case of Debbie Purdy last July.

Assisted suicide remains illegal in Britain and still carries a custodial sentence of up to 14 years for convicted offenders. But of over 130 British citizens who have so far travelled to Switzerland to be helped to kill themselves, none have even been tried, let alone convicted.

And the three most recent cases (Downes, Bateman and Rees) have all been let off on the grounds that they were ‘wholly motivated by compassion’ – a mitigating factor seemingly open to liberal interpretation and not easily testable in court (especially given that the key witness in all cases is dead and unable to give evidence).

It appears a pattern is emerging. The police seem reluctant to investigate. The DPP looks to be unwilling to prosecute. Juries are reticent to convict and judges, for those very few cases that do reach this stage, are giving light sentences.

This sort of ‘legal sanction’ is exactly what first happened in the Netherlands and led eventually to an eventual change in the law in that country - legalisation by stealth.

Holland now reports over 1,000 cases of involuntary euthanasia a year, an annual increase in cases of voluntary euthanasia and dozens of disabled children being ‘put down’ under the so-called Groningen protocol.

No wonder that disability rights leaders in this country have just launched a Resistance Campaign asking MPs to sign a charter supporting better care and services for elderly and disabled people and no change in the law.

So far Parliament has stood firm, as have professional groups like the British Medical Association, believing that any change in the law would be a threat to public safety.

One wonders however what it will take for the DPP, the very person appointed to uphold the law, actually to prosecute someone. If he wants the current law to act as an effective deterrent against abuse he will at some point have to be willing to show some teeth.

But the impression he has given with this latest judgement, is that any would-be assisters may go at least as far as Dr Irwin has thus far, without any fear of legal repercussion.