Death before birth - abortion controversies in the United Kingdom - Column

National Review, Sept 30, 1996 by Mary Kenny

The historian Robert Skidelsky once mused that it is not always in our power to plan social and moral changes in our society, for we do not know what is going to happen next: but events themselves will lead the way, or illuminate truths we already know. During the month of August, a series of events in the United Kingdom was quite extraordinarily illuminating for the future of the pro-life movement.

People in the pro-life movement had pointed out, repeatedly, that the 1967 Abortion Act had become corrupted and abused. This piece of legislation, which was ostensibly enacted as a last resort for mothers in difficult and pitiful circumstances -- Thalidomide became, indirectly, a powerful advocate for legalizing abortion --had dwindled to little but a rubber stamp for abortion on demand. (The Act itself carefully specifies that the termination of a pregnancy may be lawfully carried out only if the health of the mother is threatened, or if two doctors judge that it would be more hazardous for the woman to continue the pregnancy than to terminate it. But then it can, of course, be argued that it is always more dangerous to continue a pregnancy than not to do so, on the same principle that it is more dangerous to get up in the morning than to stay in bed.)

The original legislation said nothing about "the woman's right to choose" -- in fact, the phrase was not in common use at the time --but by the 1980s that was how the Act was being used. Abortion had become a consumer-led demand procedure, like ear-piercing, and minors often had to get more elaborate documentation of parental permission for ear-piercing than for termination of pregnancy.

But it has, over the past 15 years, been very difficult for the pro-life movement in the United Kingdom ever to get a hearing in the mainstream media, or anything but faint-hearted parliamentary support, even from Conservatives. Margaret Thatcher was never interested in the abortion issue, and indeed voted in favor. As a journalist, I have been aware of how many significant stories exist in the whole field of pro-life activity -- the Asian girls running away from home for fear of being forced into abortions, for example, and the flowering of a small pro-life hospital in Liverpool -- but I was also aware of how unreceptive the social atmosphere was: even huge rallies at Parliament attracted no media coverage at all. Then, in the first week of August, the Skidelsky theme was suddenly illustrated by an event: a shocking event to most of the population. A woman who was pregnant with twins was reported, in the Sunday Express, as seeking an abortion of one of the twins at 16 weeks. "Miss B" was healthy, the babies were healthy, but it was said that she was a poor, single mother "in straitened circumstances" with one child already who felt that she could not cope with two more babies.

The story came from an enterprising interview carried out with a gynecologist at the esteemed Queen Charlotte's hospital by a reporter named Caroline Phillips -- and just as another illustration of the hostility of the social atmosphere, the reporter herself was subsequently blackballed off the upper-class ladies' charity committee of the hospital for causing the hospital embarrassment by revealing what was going on. The doctor in question, Professor Phillip Bennett, was, incidentally, described as a conscientious Christian who felt no conflict between his faith and ethics, and performing convenience abortions.

However, there was a public uproar when the story broke: it was the event in itself that so dramatically caught the public imagination. What a dreadful thing, that a mother was so poor that she was inclined to abort one of her children. Couldn't she be helped? Couldn't she be financially supported? Couldn't one of the twins, at least, be adopted? There was a genuine, spontaneous public response, and both Life, and the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children -- the two principal pro-life groups in Britain --found themselves the focus of this public response. Something in the region of e60,000 was pledged, virtually overnight. The pro-abortion people could only mutter that it was an outrageous breach of medical confidentiality that the story should come out at all: a somewhat Pharisaical comment in the light of skillful media manipulation from the same sources when the case suited them. Curious, too, how the liberals who call constantly for "open government" and "transparency in public life" cry "breach of confidence" when the issue does not play to their purpose.

Another event at the beginning of August had also worried the public conscience: the deliberate destruction of more than three thousand unclaimed embryos held by the Human Embryo and Fertilization Authority.

These embryos were extinguished according to a statute of limitations which decreed that after five years "unwanted" embryos had to be destroyed. Professor Ian Craft, one of the most acclaimed of British fertility specialists and director of the London Fertility and Gynecology Center, compared the forgetfulness of those who had overlooked an old embryo with people who may not remember that they have a small postal savings account somewhere. But if, for professors of gynecology, embryos are just another commodity, again, for the general public there was a feeling of discomfort, and even commentators not generally sympathetic to the pro-life cause voiced hand-wringing malaise. "For years it has been enormously difficult for liberal, kindly people to express qualms about the way we treat new life," wrote Libby Purves in the Times on August 6. "The propaganda of 'pro-life' organizations is loathsome; what good does it do to torment vulnerable women with horror pictures? Churchmen have been either fuzzily forgiving or patriarchally insulting . . . The majority of us blank out the truth about how cavalierly we treat the unborn, and how illogical it is to set an arbitrary date for the birth of a soul. But it may be time we looked steadily at it all."