What about the poor girl down at the clinic?

(Ed: The trouble with this article is that it just puts one form of sentiment in the place of another.)

Those remarkable 4D neonatal scans are inescapable this week, as the Commons Science and Technology Committee pores over our 40-year-old abortion law. What moral weight these images carry, how powerfully they load the question: what kind of monstrous woman could terminate at eight weeks, when a foetus can kick and straighten its limbs, let alone at 24 when it can yawn, thumb-suck and “walk” within the womb. Besides, as any parent will recall, even at six weeks a baby’s heartbeat flickers on a scan, like a star signalling from a distant galaxy.

Against these arresting images, arguing for the retention of the 24-week limit feels like making the case for clubbing seal pups or drowning kittens. As if any one of the 2,600 British women who every year have an abortion after 20 weeks needs any reminder that she killed her unborn baby.

Our mental screen-savers are so overloaded with baby snaps we feel nothing for these desperate women, their often hideous circumstances and their grim decisions. Read more
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