The thorny issue of abortion

A Parliamentary Select Committee seems to have recommended little or no change to the Abortion Act provisions. This may come as little surprise, given the strength of opinions on all sides in the ongoing debate.

Surely, however, we can agree three things:

- that abortion should be legally available for cases where pregnancy is the result of rape, where the mother’s health is at risk or where the eventual birth would result in a baby with massive handicaps and the prospect of a short life of pain.

- that medical advances have raised the prospect of keeping alive babies born at less then 24 weeks of gestation – the current maximum. Two Conservative members of the committee have written a minority report, claiming that babies born from natural miscarriage younger than this are surviving, that evidence presented to the contrary to committee was out of date and witnesses with vested interest were suppressing evidence.

- that there were over 200,000 abortions last year, pushing the total to over 6 million since 1967. Advocates of the present or more liberal provision point out that the vast number of these were in the early weeks of pregnancy. The overall impression is that abortion is becoming something of a “late contraception”. This fact has concerned many, who did not envisage such a thing happening when the Act was passed in 1967. The group contains Lord Steele, one of the promoters in 1967. To their credit, the Government is already talking of better sex education and more freely available contraception, although they are also coming under pressure to reduce the number of medical signatures needed from two to one.

Abortion must concern us all, whatever significance we give to the unborn foetus. No abortion is entirely free from risk to the mother’s physical or mental health, - the same is true, of course of childbirth.The emphasis on contraception is surely better than the “abortion on demand” position we have effectively reached, where in some cases no counselling is given and where the second doctor to sign routinely does so without seeing the “mother”.

What is needed is a more thorough investigation of the whole issue than can be done by a lay parliamentary committee, supported by evidence that may be from vested interest.