A PRO-LIFE crusader last Thursday argued that a provision in the draft abortion bill bore similar marks to German dictator Adolf Hitler's plan to exterminate Germans who had physical or mental disabilities.

Reverend H. Earl Thames told members of the joint select committee considering the report of the Abortion Policy Review Advisory Group that Section 5c of the proposed law comes "perilously close" to Hitler's extermination of deformed people.

The draft legislation provides for pregnancy to be terminated after 22 weeks in special circumstances. It indicates that abortion would be allowed where there is substantial risk that the child would suffer serious physical or mental abnormality if it were to be delivered.

Group taken to task

The Coalition of Lawyers for the Defence of the Unborn also took the advisory group to task on the permissibility of abortion in circumstances such as the risk of the child being handicap.

Attorney-at-law David C. Henry, who made a presentation on behalf of the group, charged that the draft bill was "manifestly disingenuous and insidious".

"This smacks of Nazi Germany in which the practice of eugenics was mastered," he said, adding that the proposed law was moving in a direction that could determine the survival of "the superior race, so to speak".

Debating the report on abortion from a Judeo-Christian perspective, Reverend Thames declared that both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible showed that God's plan for human lives started from conception.

According to the clergyman, God said to Jeremiah: "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ... and ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." He said this indicated that God had a specific plan for the prophet's life even before he was born.

Abortion should remain unlawful

He argued that no doctor, psychologist or theologian could determine God's plan for a human life. In that regard, he said abortion should remain unlawful, except in the most extreme cases such as proven threat to the life of the mother.

Reverend Thames said in the case of rape or child abuse, there should not be an automatic abortion, but attempts should be made to preserve the life of the child and counsel the mother to consider adoption. "If the mother insists on an abortion, this should not be treated as a criminal offence, but as the subject of further counselling," he added.

At the end of its deliberations, the joint select committee considering the report of the abortion policy review advisory group will make its recommendations to Parliament.