By Patrick Leahy, Director of Student LifeNet
In a short space of time, abortion has become one of the major news items. Every week a new revelation becomes a mainstream headline. In the last two months alone, abortion news has featured on the front page of the Daily Mail no less than seven times. There has been a dramatic shift in public opinion and there is now unprecedented pressure on the government to reduce the upper limit.
The ball began rolling last December with Reverend Joanna Jepson’s court case about a baby aborted at 28 weeks for having a repairable cleft-palate. It received massive media attention and even notoriously pro-abortion media organisations, such as Reuters, were sympathetic to her cause. Her case not only drew attention to the plight of disabled babies, who can be aborted up to birth, but undoubtedly laid the groundwork for raising the profile of more recent abortion stories.
In January Professor John Harris, an academic on the BMA ethics committee, confessed that he supports infanticide, followed by the Government’s announcement that it was to review the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. With that review comes the opportunity to change Britain’s abortion laws in our favour.
In April, the pro-abortionists shot themselves in the proverbial foot when Channel Four showed a documentary by Julia Black, controversially depicting images of abortion. Rather than aiding her side, the programme added fuel to the fire of the abortion debate with many people questioning whether abortions after the first trimester were acceptable. It also caused immense damage to Black’s allies who were forced to admit they don’t mind killing unborn babies who look exactly like newborns.
Along with the Jepson case, the programme added salience to more recent developments, such as the case of the teenager who was offered an abortion without her parents’ consent, stories of babies surviving abortions, and Professor Stuart Campbell’s amazing 4D insights into the activities of babies in the womb.
All this has created conditions ripe for the reduction of the abortion limit and, hopefully, the abolishment of eugenic abortions. Even traditional enemies have been quick to publicly support a reduction in the time limit. Even the architect of the 1967 Abortion Act, David Steel, has called for the legal limit for terminations for “social” reasons to be cut to just 12 weeks.
Everything now depends on whether pro-life groups and individuals can – together – work effectively to reduce the upper time limit. This is our first time, in fourteen years, to take a huge swipe at the abortion laws – despite having a steadfastly pro-abortion government in power. But, if we’re to take the ultimate prize, those groups which failed to submit to the Science and Technology Committee’s recent consultation on reproductive technologies need to come on board. Rest assured, Student LifeNet will be taking the battle to universities – but are you prepared to fight with us?
Fail to act now and it could be another fourteen years until the upper limit is reduced.
Further reading:
'Is the pro-choice movement dying?'
