Here’s what we call progress

‘Progress prevails’: thus did the Guardian’s editorial on Wednesday celebrate the defeat of amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill that would have reduced the upper limit of 24 weeks for abortion and ensured that IVF clinics would need at least to consider the need for ‘supportive parenting and a father or male role model’. The newspaper observed that ‘political incorrectness [had] threatened to run wild’ in the Commons but ‘the heartening outcome was that the progressives prevailed’.

By what perverse definition can it be counted ‘progress’ that the law governing abortion has remained unchanged since 1990, despite dramatic changes both in neonatal care and scientific imaging? The argument about ‘viability’ — at what stage of pregnancy can a baby survive outside the womb? — is a poor test if it is the principal one applied by our legislators. Statistics and counter-statistics on survival rates do not strike at the heart of the matter, which is that, at 20 weeks, a baby in the womb is unmistakably a person, an individual with facial expressions, the capacity to feel pain, and most of the characteristics of ‘personhood’.