Scotland Cardinal Offers Women Money To Keep Babies

The leader of Scotland’s Roman Catholics offered money and support Sunday to women considering abortions if they had their babies instead.

“If you need financial assistance or help with equipment for your baby and feel financial pressures will force you to have an abortion, we will help,” said Cardinal Thomas Winning.

Winning, a conservative and frequent advocate of the Catholic teaching that abortion is murder, said women should contact the church’s archdiocesan office in Glasgow beginning today.

Addressing a conference organized by the anti-abortion Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, Winning said his offer was open to Catholics and non-Catholics.

Pro-abortions groups dismissed the offer as an empty gesture.

“There have been numerous attempts before now to bribe women not to have an abortion,” Birth Control Trust spokesman David Nolan said. “These bribes are an empty gesture which ignore the reality of why women need access to abortion services and why women have abortions.”

Church officials have not earmarked funds for the offer. Winning said money would come in, and he had already received one pledge of $80,000.

In Britain, abortion is available virtually on demand, and is not a big political issue.