British Section of the World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life

Daily Telegraph, 20 May 2008

For the first time since 1990, the House of Commons will today debate, and vote upon, abortion. Few issues arouse greater passions or raise more profound questions of morality.

There are many who strongly object to abortion on any grounds, other than to save the life of the mother. However, Parliament made the practice legal 40 years ago; and the debate now tends to focus on the upper limit for termination.

A series of votes in the Commons today will invite MPs to reduce the current 24-week limit. Advances in neo-natal care mean that babies born at 23 weeks cannot merely survive, but grow up to lead valuable and valued lives. It is difficult to argue a case against a reduction to 22 weeks (or even to 20, given the pace of medical progress) and we trust MPs will vote accordingly.

There is an even more pressing matter, which is the excessively large number of abortions at well below the legal ceiling. In truth, only a small number of terminations take place at more than 22 weeks. However, there are 200,000 abortions in this country every year at 12 weeks or less.

When abortion was legalised in 1967 no one imagined there would be so many terminations or that abortion would become a form of post-coital contraception. We also have the highest number of teenage pregnancies in western Europe and a growing incidence of sexually transmitted disease.

These are all of a piece and cannot be attributed to an absence of sex education, which is available in abundance in schools and in any magazine aimed at young people.

Governments routinely launch campaigns telling us not to drink, smoke, take drugs or eat to excess; yet there is no sense of a similar effort being expended on advising women about the medical and psychological trauma of abortion.

Nor is sufficient emphasis placed on adoption rather than abortion, the former having fallen precipitously while the latter has risen. It is essential that abortions are not made easier to obtain.

The suggestion that a single doctor's approval should be sought or lunchtime abortions be made available at the GPs' surgery must be resisted. We also need to question as a nation how a loss of the taboos that once acted as a constraint on behaviour conspired to make such a distressing procedure almost commonplace.

Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP whose amendments to the Fertilisation and Embryology Bill have allowed this subject to be revisited in the teeth of government objections, is to be congratulated, not least for standing up to personal intimidation.

But we should not have to wait for the appropriate legislative vehicle to come along: each Parliament should have the chance to review the law.