Threat to the privacy of women having late abortions

[MinnieBar]

here

Haven't seen this elsewhere on the site, and I'm really hoping it will remain just a threat, but I find this disturbing.

(regular lurker on here if not regular poster)

Not as horrifying as aborting a perfectly healthy baby at 28 weeks because of a cleft palate which is the sort of cases they are discussing.
Nowhere does it say identities will be revealed but only the distant possibility of identification through the report.

Good lord that's terrible. The comments underneath (read the first 20 or so) are all in one direction too.

The reason that people will be able to identify will be for the same reasons cited by people nervous around the time of the census. Their fears were unfounded IMO (as census data is never released going down to 1 person as far as I know) and at the moment DoH data for this has a minimum ten in a sample to provide anonimity.

The fact that this has been challenged by a vocal pro-life group shows that the intentions are hardly going to be much fun for the people they manage to identify. I am surprised that this challenge has passed as a basic premise of stats of this type are that people looking at them should never be able to identify individuals.

AbFab they are discussing all late term abortions in the UK - 130 out of however many tens or hundreds of thousands of pregnancy. In the article it points out that the "cleft palate" scandal which I remember well was thrown out of court as it transpired that the cases under discussion involved additional factors - something which the hard stats didn't take into account - she mentions that in the article.

But aborting a foetus at 28 weeks on the basis of disability is ok AbFab? Cleft palate is very often an indicator of a more serious condition, it is not always a simple and easily corrected abnormality.

It should ALWAYS be the woman's choice whether or not to continue with the pregnancy, and those women who do choose to go through a late procedure should not have to justify their choices to anyone other than themselves. The possibility, however distant, that their identities may be disclosed is appalling.

I think the question that people who support this could answer for me would be: What positive purpose will this serve? Why support it? The stats are already there. And 130 out of all the annual pregnancies in the UK isn't that many. Why do they want individual data, what are they going to do with it? What's the point, what's the aim?

"It should ALWAYS be the woman's choice whether or not to continue with the pregnancy, and those women who do choose to go through a late procedure should not have to justify their choices to anyone other than themselves. The possibility, however distant, that their identities may be disclosed is appalling."

Completely agree. Absolutely if you haven't the intelligence to understand the information you read, refrain from posting in an inflammatory way.

I think the furore the prolifers always cause re late abortions in completely out of kilter with the reality of how many women opt for this - 130 late abortions in a year is such a small number, and I cannot imagine any of those decisions was made lightly.

The cleft palate case is significant because it was established that there were NO additional disabilities. The baby was terminated for this and this alone.

Gitawf. How rude!

The article states the details were never disclosed, so how is it that you have established that there were no further abnormalities? And even if you did have that information, this does not change the fact that the existence of a cleft palate IS an indicator for other disabilities, and it may have been that markers for these were found without a conclusive diagnosis.

Further to that, why do you feel that you are better placed to decide whether or not this pregnancy should have been terminated than the woman carrying it (and potentially her partner and wider family) and the medical professionals who were advising her?

I'm not going into the ins and outs of that particular case but, having read the link, I cannot see how an identity will be revealed unless by those who already know, putting two and two together.

I am far form pro life, BTW. But I am not pro choice . More that abortion is a very necessary " evil". I couldn't live anywhere it wasn't legal.

i agree with the messages it is the womans right to choose she does not take the decision lightly and does not have to justify to anyone all these so called christian dogooders have not heard of the saying people who love in glass houses should not throw stones

Of course an identity can be revealed if vehement anti-abortionists interrogate the details of 130 procedures a year. They managed to identify the doctors in the cleft palate case. Healthcare statistics are supposed to be anonymised for very good reasons. EVERYONE is entitled to medical confidentiality and the pro-life brigade should have the common decency to respect that.

I allowed details of my pregnancy with ds to go on an NHS register for researchers, because I had a medical condition that means pregnancy can be higher risk. I would not have consented had I known the information commissioner was free to decide my and ds's personal and confidential information could be broadcast to any nosey parker with an axe to grind.

AbFab are you arguing that the law should be changed on this?

For what purpose?

Absolutey, with all due respect you sound totally uninformed on this issue. The Jenson case was thrown out of court because it was actually much more complex than she and the media portrayed it.

If you don't want to get involved with the specifics of the Jenson case, why don't you provide us with some stats about the number of 'perfectly healthy' babies with cleft palates that are aborted each year?

I don't post on this topic, because I don't have a clue about it, but I do feel very strongly about abortion, and that it's a woman's right to choose, and that choice should remain confidential.

This just sounds to me like another way to punish women for daring not to be incubators.

Jepson

Another person who doesn't post on this topic much but I'm still finding it hard to understand how a mother could be identified from the data held and released - yes doctors could easily be identified - if you know the hospital and date of the operation, yes of course you could figure out that there will be only one or two possibilities, but as for the mothers, I'm not so sure.

But I do know someone who had a late termination when the 20 week scan showed up a condition which would have killed the baby within weeks and for those weeks he would have been in continual pain. I doubt the fact that people would find out later and hassle her even came into her mind - and nor should it.

"Importantly, the challenge to the DH's stance does not come from a neutral academic research body in need of clearer data for medical research. It comes from the ProLife Alliance, an overtly anti-choice campaign group with a clear and stated agenda to completely end the provision of abortion services in the UK"

one word... fuckers!

The department of health's stance of agregating the results is completely sensible - I can't see any reason for individual data apart from to identify the individuals and make their life even more hell than it already is having had to make that awful decision.

It's frighteningly easy to identify people from all sorts of data, if you're one of 130 people who've had a procedure during the year, I wouldn't have thought it would be that hard to find you, especially if the people looking are well versed in freedom of information requests/have the time to just camp out and watch certain doctors.

Jepson should have been defrocked. Someone who cannot understand confidentiality or who chooses to break it is not fit to be a priest. She certainly demonstrated that she lacked compassion. She will have caused great pain to the poor woman whose medical details she was shouting about all over the media.

Stats (and potentially identifying details) are never going to give you the whole picture, medically and personally. Obviously with the extremist pro-life organisations they are so entrenched in their views that they don't care about the bigger picture, but the media damn well should, otherwise you end up with people thinking that 'dozens' of women have late abortions for 'trivial' or 'cosmetic' reasons.

A few years ago I was a temp at a hospital and had access to people's medical records via the database and archives ? hopefully things have tightened up now, but I remember looking up a family member (didn't peek, I scared myself with just the idea that I could).

The difficulty with pro-lifers is they actually can't see past the foetus to the woman carrying it. They have a blind spot. They desperately don't want abortions but they present very few ideas about how to alleviate teh impact that would have on women and what they would do about the inevitable back street abortions.

There was that clip on the internet where they were asking people at a pro-life demo who were holding signs saying it was murder etc, various questions. Like, if you get it made illegal and it is murder, should a woman who gets an illegal abortion be imprisoned? What then would happen to the baby? Should the women face the death penalty? They were mostly completely stumped, having apparently given no thought to what making abortion illegal would actually mean in practice.

Hence Jepson and others of that ilk. They think they have "right on their side" and are battling to "save babies" and give absolutely not one thought to the women involved. So there has to be enormous concern what the prolife people would do with this information. using it responsibly is highly unlikely, I would think.

I think one of the problems with Jepson was that the media completely indulged her 'this is like saying my life isn't worth living' stance, which is so obviously a personal over-identification which doesn't allow for any neutral objectivity and doesn't apply to any situation but her own, but it was like the 'elephant in the room' and sort of 'she's a vicar with a disability' so no-one can disagree.