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Leading article: New limit on abortions

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Abortion is an issue guaranteed to divide opinion. On one side are the militant pro-lifers, who would hesitate to allow abortion even to save the life of the mother or prevent the birth of babies with the most severe handicaps. On the other is the extreme wing of the women’s rights lobby, who would allow abortion on demand to within a month of a full-term pregnancy. One side interprets last week’s remarkable photographs of the development of foetuses in the womb as proof that all abortions should be banned, the other that they are a form of blackmail against women considering abortion.

In between is the majority view, which went along with the liberalisation of Britain’s abortion laws nearly 40 years ago with the 1967 Abortion Act but is getting uneasy about recent developments. Those include reports in this newspaper of babies living after botched abortions and they include medical advances which mean that babies born at the legal limit for “on demand” abortions — 24 weeks — can survive. We should consider, too, what abortion means for medical staff; in one ward they are saving a life while in another they are destroying it.

Legal abortion is one of the most common operations carried out in Britain. The latest official figures for 2002 show that there were nearly 185,000 abortions, with all but 10,000 on UK residents. Nearly a quarter of conceptions result in abortion, leaving Britain with one of the highest rates in Europe. While the trends in other countries are down — in America rates are at their lowest since 1974 — abortions are rising here. This is partly because of concerns over the safety of the pill and fecklessness but mainly because “social” abortions have become accepted.

Ann Furedi, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, says women may decide to have an abortion late in pregnancy because they discover their boyfriend is having an affair or because it has taken them a long time to make up their mind. One anti-abortion campaigner asked schoolgirls what they would do if they found they were pregnant just before a skiing holiday. The answer was that they would have an abortion and go on holiday. This was not what the drafters of the 1967 act had in mind when specifying the conditions for abortion. First, a baby would “harm the woman’s physical or mental health” more than an abortion and second, it would harm other children the woman already had.

Only the misguided would want to turn back the clock to the pre-1967 days of back street abortions and the stigma attached even to medically necessary terminations. Figures show that abortions have been carried out on girls as young as nine, which is shocking. It would be much more shocking, however, if such girls were required to proceed with the pregnancy. Nobody would pretend, even for women who appear casual about it, that the decision to abort is as easy as it may seem. Many women have been haunted in later life by a decision to terminate a pregnancy.

Even so, there is a case for revisiting Britain’s abortion laws. In 1990 the 28-week limit on on-demand abortions set in the 1967 act was reduced to 24 weeks. Now Lord Steel, who as a Liberal MP introduced that act, has joined others who are pressing to reduce the limit for “normal” abortions to about 12 weeks, in line with some other countries in Europe. That would not prevent the overwhelming majority of abortions; between 85% and 90% are carried out in the first three months of pregnancy. There is an argument, indeed, for making early abortions easier.

At the same time, later abortions should be confined to cases of genuine medical need. More than 100 abortions are carried out each year after 24 weeks because of “physical or mental abnormalities” in the foetus or grave risk to the mother. Those abnormalities include the foetus with a cleft lip and palate aborted at 28 weeks, over which the Rev Joanna Jepson has been campaigning. But of the many thousands aborted each year between 12 and 24 weeks, most are for social reasons. The case for a new limit in this category is a powerful one. It is time to debate a change in the law.

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