Bruce Anderson

Abortion is a matter of aesthetics

Bruce Anderson says that the current discussion about when to terminate a foetus owes nothing to morality

issue 17 July 2004

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.

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