Evan Harris

ABORTION...

There's more...

crossposted at liberalconspiracy.org.

I feel the need to rant (in a gracious way) about the liberal Abortion Act amendments that have been tabled for the fast-approaching report stage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. My male chum Unity has already reported on the time-limit amendment tabled (again) by the one and only Mad Nads Dorries: I wanted to write a bit about the sensible contributions.

Tabled by Evan Harris, Chris McCafferty and Frank Dobson, the two liberal amendments would improve the Abortion Act by - to put it simply - making access to legal abortion easier than it is. The proposals are to get rid of the present requirement for two doctors to approve a request for an abortion, and to make it legal for nurses to perform the procedure.

The case for liberalising abortion law in these ways is as strong as it is encouraging. Abortion Rights has a good paper on the topic which I was reading up until a few minutes ago when their site fell off the face of the earth. Will link to the paper when I find it again.

This story is also posted at liberalconspiracy.org

Why the anti-abortion lobby must be stopped from amending abortion law and reducing the upper time limit for abortion via the government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

A little preamble: There is nothing in this world that winds yours truly up like political and/or religious opportunists banging on about restricting access to legal abortion, and foetus rights, and 40 years of legal abortion delivering Britain of two generations of conscience-free sluts, etc.

The truth is that pro-lifers drive me BANANAS. I have frothed about them all over the internet and most social events I've attended.

Alas, the pro-life contingent and their political backers witter on, undaunted by the fact that the great majority of the British public supports a woman's right to choose.

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About 300 women (and a small cluster of blokes) turned up at the Houses of Parliament last week for an Abortion Rights meeting about the threat posed to the 1967 Abortion Act by proposed - and opportunistic - anti-abortion amendments to the government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Pro-lifers are particularly keen to lower the present 24-week gestational limit for abortion.

The bill - as you doubtless have guessed - has absolutely nothing to do with abortion law (it's about reforming the regulation of human embryology as the sciences of fertilisation and embryology move on at pace). Sadly, complete irrelevance ain't putting the god-squad off.

One Baroness Masham has already attempted to perpetrate an amendment to reduce access to abortion for women who discover their babies have severe disabilities. Her notion was to force women in that situation to see their pregnancies to term - to give birth, as renowned pro-choice doctor Wendy Savage said at the abortion rights meeting - to children they know are doomed.

MPs might be crazy, but they're not all stupid, and the brighter ones know very well how women instinctively respond to the thought of being trapped by an unwanted pregnancy.