What really lies behind the Marie Stopes abortion suspension?

Marie Stopes, which is for many women, a trusted brand name synonymous with safe women’s reproductive care, has been forced to suspend a number of abortion procedures following a surprise inspection from its regulators, the Care Quality Commission (CQC). 

This news has massive implications, not that one would realise it from the reaction of the mainstream media, not least because it exposes as a myth the pro-choice mantra that abortion needs to be legal in order to be safe. 

The CQC have said that the 250 women who had been booked in for an abortion at Marie Stopes this week will be sent elsewhere in order to protect them from ‘potential harm’. If that’s not damning then I don’t know what is. If this was happening in any other area of health care, where 98 per cent of clients were directly referred from and paid for by the NHS, the media would rightly be demanding answers. According to Marie Stopes’s most recent accounts from 2014, their UK income amounted to £37 million, the majority of which came from the provision of 70,000 abortions. All that money – and yet the safety of all those thousands of women can not be guaranteed. 

Naturally enough, Marie Stopes and their unofficial propaganda arm, The Guardian,  have sought to downplay what has happened, as being a simple matter of red tape. It is, it says, ‘working with the CQC to ensure that all of our processes comply with their guidelines on training and governance.’ It has, it says, ‘taken some of our services off line’. 

One might be tempted to think that this is all a big misunderstanding. It’s just a matter of ticking a few boxes on the right pieces of paper and nothing to get hot under the collar about. Indeed the spokesman from Marie Stopes seemed to be rather indignant about the matter, saying that the organisation was slightly surprised by the timing and tone of the announcement. ‘This was about governance and protocols and there was nothing that endangered the safety of the clients’, he said. 

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