Abortion "under siege" in the UK

I am sitting with an abortionist in a counselling room in a central London clinic. Downstairs, on a padded surgical bed covered with blue paper, 5,000 pregnancies a year are ended. In the waiting room sit women and their male lovers. None of them is leafing through the magazines provided, but some are clutching Kleenex.

All look haunted. Don’t panic. This isn’t going to be a Me and My Abortion article, a grim Tracey Eminish journey through my harrowing gynaecological history.

I’m here because it’s the 35th anniversary of Roe v Wade in the US, a country where a woman’s right to choose is far from constitutional and remains under constant attack from the pro-life, evangelical Christian Bible Belt and the Catholic church; a country where schoolchildren are encouraged to adopt, name and pray for the souls of blastocytes destined for termination, and where a bill signed by Governor Mike Rounds, in South Dakota almost two years ago, made abortion illegal in most cases, including rape or incest.

I’m here because the pro-life lobby is also making hay in Britain. Antiabortion lobby groups are attempting to hijack the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill currently going through the Lords, in the hope of introducing an amendment that would chop the time limit on legal abortion from the current 24 weeks down to 20 weeks. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Abortion Act last year, there was a rally in Westminster and a ghoulish “service of remembrance” for the estimated 6.7m foetuses destroyed since 1967. Read more
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