An estimated 400 000 foetuses have been legally aborted between 1997 and 2004, a Christian advocacy group told Parliament’s health portfolio committee on Tuesday.
”You are cutting off your future … Your own voters … will not be raising up any children to support you,” said Jeanine McGill, spokesperson for the Christian View Network.
McGill was speaking during public hearings on the Choice of Termination of Pregnancy Amendment Bill, which seeks to allow registered nurses — who have undergone prescribed training — to perform abortions.
”We are concerned that this Bill forces more places and more people to kill the unborn. The interest of God must also be taken into account.
”As parliamentarians, your duty is to make laws that protect not only the strong and powerful, but the weak and defenceless,” she said.
McGill said South Africans are likely to see a decrease in the population in the next two to three decades.
”If we add, on top of that, making many of our young women … infertile through abortion, we are not acting in the interests of our country,” she said.
McGill, members of Human Life International (HLI), Pro-Life South Africa and the Evangelical Alliance of South Africa (Easa) urged MPs to repeal the 1996 Choice of Termination of Pregnancy Act.
”We propose that the current law be repealed on moral grounds before God and to protect the future of South Africa,” McGill said.
Philip Rosenthal of the Easa said the amendment Bill is adding ”a certain level of evil” to the existing Act.
”The law is taking a certain level of evil to a higher degree of evil,” he said.
Father Gregory Charnock of the HLI said: ”We regard it [the Act] as an intrinsically evil Act, which strikes human life at the time of its greatest frailty when babies in the womb lack any means of defence.” — Sapa