|
|
|
|
Abortion back on the agenda in the UK
|
|
Disclaimer: I'm not a chrsitian and I don't hold the view that a child is a human being from conception. As such I am not against abortion in the early months of pregnancy.
Yesterday in the UK, the Conservative Party leader Michael Howard put the abortion back onto the political agenda of Britain. In recent weeks the Tories have been doing very well at setting the agenda, this has been because of their demographic targetting software pruchased from one Karl Rove six months ago. It appears to be working. The abortion issue has not been put on to the agenda in terms of banning it however, it has been raised in relation to our time limits for abortion. In the UK you cannot have an abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy. This has caused a bit of a storm amongst the Labour Party who care scared that Britain will go down the route of America and start to have abortion as a wedge issue. I personally don;t agree with that notion, but the Labour Party, and Tony Blair personally have said the argument should not be discussed and the law is fine. I'm not sure I entirely agree with that though.
As some of you know from the limeys at Asylum who have discussed abortion before, the reason that the abortion time limit was set at 24 weeks was because it was agreed (in Parliament and with the Church of England) that it was not until at least 24 weeeks that the child could exist independently of the mother. In other words it was based on the survival chance of the child outside the womb. That was back in the 1970s. Midwifery practice today states that they consider a child "viable" at 21 weeks (I have that straight from an NNS "Pregnancy" book) and there have now been cases of children born from 21 weeks on that have survived because of new technological and medical advances. Now, given that Britain quite rightly made this issue one of clincal viability in relation to the survival of the child when it drew up the law I am not quite sure why it is wrong to review the law on the same grounds now. If a child can be shown to be able to survive indepedently of the mother at an earlier date than the law currently sets then surely the law should be changed to take account of that.
There is no doubt of course that Howard is targeting a particular demographic for votes. He's a politician, what do you expect? Labour do it to. Opportunism is not the reserve of the Tory Party alone and to suggest otherwise would be intellectually bankrupt. However, there is also a logical argument for the reviewal of a law drawn up many years ago which is not now in date with current clinical thinking. I think the clincal argument is the key here. If the medical profession has evidence that a child can survive before 24 weeks then the law should reflect that (unless of course one refuses to acknowledge the underlying assumptions used in the drawing up of the current legislation, which I guess is one prerogative, although it would be a bit disingenuous).
Let's put this in perspective for a minute though. 24 weeks pregnant is 6 months. The proposal of 20 weeks is therefore 5 month. Even if the law was changed to a middle ground option of 22 weeks, that is still a 5 months plus period after conception. Only an extermely small minority would not know they were pregnant at that sort of time, and one would assume that if one wanted an abortion they would not wait until they were over half way gone before they decided to have one.
The proposal being put forward are certainly designed to be vote catching, but they do also make logical sense in relation to the basis of our current laws.
|
|
|
|
|
