Streatham abortion clinic puts women's lives at risk, damning new report says
In its report, published 29 January 2020, the Care Quality Commission said that the Streatham abortion clinic required improvement on safety, effectiveness and responsiveness. Furthermore the section on whether the clinic was “well-led” was rated as inadequate.
This clinic is run by Britain’s largest abortion provider, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS). The report has stated the clinic “requires improvement” and is the first abortion facility in the country to be ranked as “inadequate” on leadership.
The report exposes that “the service did not always make sure staff were competent for their roles.” The report went on to say: “We found one staff record where certain competencies for the role they were employed for had not been signed off since they started the organisation over three years ago.”
The report is particularly damning about the clinic’s leadership, rating it as inadequate. It said that “local leaders did not always have the skills and abilities to run the service”, and “staff did not always feel respected, supported and valued” and “risks were not always fully identified, and actions taken to reduce their impact”.
The report says: “Most staff we spoke with, told us they felt the culture was reactive rather than proactive, with a culture of blame and harassment and this had created an unsupportive and demoralising environment at the centre.”
The report states: “The clinic had recently started to offer to patients the home use of misoprostol. However, we found women were not offered the choice of returning to the clinic to take the second tablet if they wanted to.”
This is the second time in months that a BPAS clinic has been rated as inadequate following a report in September of the Merseyside abortion clinic.
This is not the first time the CQC has reported inadequate and unethical practises at British abortion providers including BPAS and Marie Stopes, including unregistered nurses.
Abortion – whether legal or illegal – is never safe. The Care Quality Commission has previously exposed the unethical practises of Britain’s second largest abortion provider, Marie Stopes. 2,600 serious incidents were reported in 2015. In 2016, a damning report revealed that 400 botched abortions were carried out in two months. In a separate three-month period, 11 women needed emergency transfers - ‘one needed surgery and two required blood transfusions’ - to hospitals after this leading abortion provider, (often applauded by abortion advocates as a beacon of women’s healthcare), put the lives of these women in life-threatening danger. Not only do Marie Stopes – and BPAS - have absolutely zero regard for the lives of unborn babies; they also disregard the safety and health of the women whom they claim to care for.
Marie Stopes don’t have the compassion and respect to give women proper face-to-face, personal consultations. Furthermore, they manipulate the reasons for abortion these women provide. ‘By the time the reporter got to the clinic, her “I just don’t want the baby” justification had been recorded in her medical notes as ‘client is unable emotionally to continue with pregnancy’, which fits the legal conditions’. In one centre, doctors handled a consultation with a woman with a learning disability “poorly and insensitively” and failed to ensure she understood what abortion involved.
Marie Stopes, a profitable business, determines the fate of unborn babies and “effectively rubber-stamps a decision” that their mothers “regret for the rest of their days”. The CQC inspectors at the Marie Stopes centre in Maidstone, Kent voiced concern over the fact that when certifying the legal grounds for an abortion, “the two certifying doctors had not usually seen the patient prior to a termination”. The doctors instead “relied on the healthcare assistance or nurse’s summary of the facts”.
These “remote doctors” that approve abortions for women they’ve never seen in person mirrors the cold, faceless, money-making machine that is Marie Stopes. One doctor was reported signing 26 consent forms in two minutes, signing for babies to be poisoned and dismembered. Dr John Parsons, former Marie Stopes’ consultant gynaecologist, said “We worked in an atmosphere of bullying and pressure – it was nothing more than a conveyor belt service.”
Inspectors at Marie Stopes also found failings in infection control systems, with poor hand hygiene, and failures in following basic surgery checklists. Remains of aborted babies were left in “open hazardous waste bins”.
Marie Stopes and BPAS are nothing more than lucrative abortion chains which profit from killing the most vulnerable in society and putting women’s lives at risk.