On Monday (4th February) BBC’s Panorama aired a show on “the great abortion divide” between Northern Ireland and the UK.
The programme, presented by Victoria Derbyshire, considered in part whether doctors in the UK were “bending the law” to offer abortion to women on demand.
Illegal
In the UK, abortion is illegal under the Abortion Act 1967 unless two doctors agree that one of the grounds for abortion outlined in the Act have been met.
98 per cent of abortions are carried out under Ground C, which permits a termination where the risk to the mother’s mental health is greater if she continued with the pregnancy than if she has an abortion.
No evidence
Ms Derbyshire highlighted that there was “no evidence” that in all 98 per cent of cases there was a genuine risk to the mother’s mental health.
She said:“Whilst some women are genuinely at risk [of a mental health problem] there’s no evidence that this is true of 98 per cent of women who get an abortion.”
Pretend
Ann Furedi, CEO of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), commented that doctors had to make the law “work” to enable more abortions to take place. Five years ago Ms Furedi wrote an article stating that “women have to pretend they will have a nervous breakdown if they continue the pregnancy, and doctors pretend to believe them.”
When questioned on whether she still stood by her statement Ms Furedi said: “I think that doctors would be far happier with a situation where they didn’t have to go through the arrangements that exist at the moment, but because they do, we all make it work.”
Perjury
Dr Peter Saunders, CEO of the Christian Medical Fellowship, said that the practice of doctors signing abortions off without medical evidence of a risk to the mother’s mental health was “illegal” and amounted to “a form of perjury”.
Reaction
Andrea Minichiello Williams, chief executive of Christian Concern, said: “This simply highlights what we already know. Abortion is essentially available on an ‘on-demand’ basis. This might be what the abortion industry wants but it is not what people had in mind when the Abortion Act was passed in 1967.
“No one could ever have imagined back then the situation we find ourselves in today where nearly 200,000 babies a year are aborted, most of them illegally.
“Abortion laws need to be urgently reviewed. We cannot let so many innocent lives be taken each year”.