Pictures are more powerful than principles. A few weeks ago, newspapers published photographs of a 12-week-old male foetus. It was not a blob of tissue but a proto-human. Yet for a further 12 weeks after the pictures were taken it would have been legal to kill this pre-baby in the womb. Other stories appeared. A child had been born at 23 weeks. That is within the legal limit for abortions. It had lived.
Nor did all aborted foetuses die in the womb. Occasionally, mistakes were made and little creatures emerged alive. They were put on one side, until they alleviated everyone’s embarrassment by expiring.
The photographs and the details led to a lot of foot-shuffling. David Steel said that his original 1967 Abortion Act, which legalised it, was not intended to allow abortion on demand. Tony Blair announced that the law on abortion ought, perhaps, to be reviewed. There was a lot of talk about ‘viability’, the age at which foetuses became capable of surviving outside the womb. The implication was clear. If only the scientists could advise us on the technology of life, we could forget about the morality.
Rarely has such an important debate been conducted with such shallow arguments. If Lord Steel was not aware that his Act had led to abortion on demand, he must have gone to considerable lengths for many years now to avoid all contact with the abortion statistics. Recently, one woman and her abortionist did get into trouble. That was because they told the truth. They admitted that the pregnancy had been terminated because the foetus had a hare-lip. It is not legal to have abortions because of the future baby’s cosmetic defects, and the abortionist would have been hard put to defend himself in court. But no one in authority wanted to bring a prosecution.
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