Abortion (Amendment) Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 9:38 am on 22 January 1988.

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Photo of Mr David Alton Mr David Alton , Liverpool Mossley Hill 9:38, 22 January 1988

I agree with the hon. Lady that a return to the back streets would not be progress. If it were possible to have introduced a Abortion (Utopia) Bill, I would have introduced it. No one would wish for a return to the back streets, but the nature of the operation that I described can be undertaken only by a doctor and a nurse if it is undertaken so late in pregnancy.

In other countries in western Europe that have a rational time limit such as that I have suggested, there is no problem with back-street abortions. In confirmation of that, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale (Mr. Steel) said: it true … that the bulk of the illegal abortions, the backstreet abortions, which go on today occur not at the stage where the foetus is fairly advanced … but at an early stage." —[Official Report, 13 July 1967; Vol. 750, c. 1347.] It is a paradox that we spend some £13 million a year on abortions in Britain, when doctors and nurses should be using their skills to care for and cradle life, not to extinguish it and snuff it out. Care and kill can never be used as synonyms.

The nurse's observation that aborted babies are perfect is invariably true. Of the 8,276 late abortions undertaken last year, 92 per cent. were on perfectly healthy children. The Bill, by imposing an upper time limit, sets out to stop that. Hard cases are used to try to rubbish the Bill—but hard cases make bad law. However, those hard cases will be brought up during the debate and should be examined in detail.