House of Commons Hansard Debates for 24 Apr 1990

Miss Widdecombe : We are not a grandmother--

Mr. James Pawsey (Rugby and Kenilworth) : Yet.

Miss Widdecombe : Nor ever, I am afraid.

I am sure that most hon. Members understand that, when I said "we", I meant that group of hon. Members who have pioneered Bills on this issue and who have talked to other hon. Members who broadly support their approach. They have forged out what is and is not accepable. I was referring to hon. Members including the Father of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point, the hon. Member for Mossley Hill, the hon. Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours), who regrettably is absent, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Duffy) and many others who share similar views.

As to what is meant by "for a while", how long is a piece of string? A decent interval must mean just that. We, I or anyone may go to Government again to say that the House wants to take a decision on this matter and must do so, but if we simply get into the habit of coming back with a whole load of similar or different proposals, frankly we would not deserve the trust of Government, nor would I expect to receive it. Therefore, "for a while" means a decent interval.

So far I have devoted time to the various amendments and I have spoken about 20 weeks, 22 weeks and 24 weeks. Finally I should like to consider the question of 18 weeks. That limit has not been dreamt up as some sort of arbitrary line. When the hon. Member for Mossley Hill was considering the subject of late abortions, he had to ask himself, what is a late abortion and where does it start? The figure of 18 weeks had come up in the Lane committee and it is the period beyond which growth but no further development takes place. That figure seemed to be a few weeks away from the point that medical science had reached as being able to sustain viability. Looking forward to the future, and in the desire for long-term law, 18 weeks seemed a reasonable limit.

The Second Reading of the Bill promoted by the hon. Member for Mossley Hill was marked by excellent contributions from all sides and two arguments were presented against the 18-week limit--disability and the amniocentesis test. We have conceded the argument on disability and the amniocentesis test and they have been taken out of the debate. The other arguments against the 18- week limit related to menopausal women, young girls and rape victims. We have specifically introduced an amendment relating to rape in amendment (s) because we were not satisfied with the clause introduced by my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State. When we looked at the statistics relating to abortions carried out on menopausal women and young children we found that the percentages were so low--0.4 per cent. and 0.5 per cent., respectively--that that argument was not worth pursuing.

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It is important to remind the House of one fact. We are told that late abortions are principally due to delays in the National Health Service. Some 50 per cent. of abortions carried out after the 18th week are done on non-resident women who come here to get around the laws in their own countries.

Ms. Short : So what?

Miss Widdecombe : The hon. Lady may think that that is all right, but it is important to remember that those women have not been subject to delays in the NHS. The 8 per cent. of abortions conducted because of severe foetal abnormality will not be affected by the proposals that we have put forward. As great a variety of reasons are presented for the remainder of late abortions as there are for those at an earlier stage.

Given that we have exempted from the limit the major consideration of disability, and given that we need a law which will last and not need to be revised on the basis of some cataclysmic advance in medical science next week or next year, I ask the House to consider seriously the 18-week limit. Beyond that, the House should go no higher than the limit of 20 weeks, at which we give the dignity of a funeral and insist that resuscitation equipment be available.

Mr. Eric Martlew (Carlisle) : Will the hon. Lady give way?

Miss Widdecombe : We have all sorts of protection at the 20th week. If we go for the 22nd week, we are doing no more than accepting the Secretary of State's statement about where viability starts.

Mr. Martlew : Will the hon. Lady give way to the Member representing Carlisle?

Miss Widdecombe : I urge hon. Members to think hard, when they vote today, about what it is that they are talking about. We are not talking about some abstract view of women's rights, nor even about conscience or religion, but about a living mortal in the womb whom we cannot see

Mr. Martlew : On a point of order.

Miss Widdecombe : That living mortal is there in the womb. It cannot protect itself and it deserves the protection of the House. Several hon. Members rose--

The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means : Order. I have a point of order from the hon. Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew).

Mr. Martlew : On a point of order, Miss Boothroyd. Is it right that the hon. Lady can quote a case in my constituency at great length and not give way to me?

The Second Deputy Chairman : Whether or not she gives way is in the hands of the hon. Lady.

6 pm

Sir David Steel (Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale) : It must be said in defence of the hon. Member for Maidstone (Miss Widdecombe)-- [Interruption.]

The Second Deputy Chairman : Order.

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Sir David Steel : I am trying to say a word in defence of the hon. Member for Maidstone, who today made a more moderate speech to advance her view than those which we have listened to and read about outside the House, for which we must be grateful. I have two quarrels with her, which I shall come to later. The first is that she still tries to set herself up as a medical authority, greater than others, on the time limit that the House should accept. Secondly, I would not accuse her of telling horror stories to the House, but I accuse her of telling the same horror story over and over again.

Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) : It is a terrible story.

Sir David Steel : It is a terrible story, and it was a ghastly tragedy. But I do not believe that we should set the law based on the one ghastly tragedy of the Carlisle case. There is a raft of experience of the working of abortion law.

Mr. Martlew : That case has deliberately been used by the opponents of abortion. The case was a set-up. The doctor who refused treatment was a member of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. We accept that the foetus should have been put in an incubator and treated. The fact that the case has been used by the

anti-abortionists is a slur on the good hospital and the good doctors in it.

The priest involved, who was not the chaplain of that hospital, received evidence about the case in confidence, and he broke that confidentiality. The organisation has used the case time and time again, despite the agony and distress that it caused to the woman involved. Does the House know that the woman was interviewed at great length by the police after the tragedy because of the actions of those involved, who exploited the case? I agree with the right hon. Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale (Sir D. Steel) that it was a tragedy, but it has been used gratesquely by those opposed to abortion at any price, not at 18, 22 or 28 weeks, but altogether. They are using the same tactics again today.

Sir David Steel : I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way in his intervention. He made a helpful point, as the local Member of Parliament, about what happened in that hospital. His intervention underlines my point that we should not base future legislation on one experience, however tragic and unhappy. We should consider the totality of experience and the working of the 1929 and 1967 legislation when coming to our decisions tonight.

I hope that the Committee will consider it reasonably appropriate that, as the promoter of the 1966 legislation, I should address myself--

Miss Widdecombe rose --

Sir David Steel : I shall give way later, but the hon. Lady should let me get going and cover some of my points, in the hope that I can prevent unnecessary interventions.

We should survey what has happened to the practice of abortion since we changed the law in 1967. I start by reminding the House, particularly the hon. Member for Maidstone--she was not a Member of the House when we debated issues such as rape and incest and whether they should be included or excluded from the legislation--that there is nothing new in that argument. The House went over it time and again during the passage of that legislation.

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More importantly, I should like to remind the House about the state of the law and the practice on abortion before 1967. We do not have the figures for abortion then, as we have since 1967. One of the stipulations of the 1967 Act was that every abortion had to be recorded and published. However, two surveys were done before 1967. I do not lay claim to their accuracy, but they were published in 1914 and 1940, and both estimated--I stress that it was only an estimate--that there were about 100,000 illegal abortions in this country. That compares with a figure, which many may feel is too high, of 182,000 in England and Wales last year.

There were high numbers of illegal abortions before 1967, and there were none of today's campaigning organisations against abortion in those days. Such organisations have campaigned only against safe, legal abortions, not the illegal ones that happened then. I do not have an exact figure of abortions, but I have some accurate figures from the Department of Health that give us a clue about the picture before 1967. The number of women discharged from hospital with post-abortion sepsis in 1965 was 3,050 and in 1982, just 390--10 per cent. of the pre-1967 figure. That gives an indication of the scale of abortion going on, about which we were supposed not to know. In the three years from 1961 to 1963, 160 women were recorded , in this country as dying as a result of abortions. In the three years from 1985 to 1987, the figure was four. How can anyone say that it has not been a major social advance to have achieved the end of the scourge of illegal abortion in Britain?

The second argument of those who want to reduce the availability of abortion is that in this country we have an exaggeratedly high rate of abortion. I accept that some other countries have lower rates of abortions than we do, but a great many countries have high rates of abortion. I objected to an hon. Lady, who is not present, so I shall not mention her name, saying in the House some weeks ago that this country was a foetal dustbin. I resent and reject such phrases, because the figures do not bear out such claims.

The rate of abortion is measured internationally by the number of abortions per 1,000 women of child-bearing age. Last year, in England and Wales, the figure was 14.8 per thousand women. In Scotland, it was 8.9. The last year for which we have total international figures is, sadly, back in 1983-84, for which the figure for England and Wales was 12.8. In France, in the same period, the figure was 14.9, in East Germany, it was 26.6, in Italy it was 19, in Denmark it was 18.4, in Sweden it was 17.7, in Poland it was 16.5, in Norway it was 15.9, in Czechoslovakia it was 34.5 and in Bulgaria-- presumably because of the lack of any family planning policy--it was an appalling 61.9 per thousand.

Let us set the British figures in the context of the legal abortion rate of other European countries. In this country, we are not carrying out an excessive number of abortions, judging by international standards. It is a slur on the practice of medicine in this country to go on repeating and conveying the impression that there is an outrageous level of abortion in Britain.

I think, if I caught her words correctly, that the hon. Member for Maidstone said that 50 per cent. of late abortions were carried out on foreign women. She said that that was not due to delays in the National Health Service, and of course it is not. It stands to reason that, if

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people come to this country from other countries, that takes time. Presumably they have undergone processes elsewhere, and then come to this country.

In 1983, before the Spaniards changed their law, exactly 22,000 women from Spain came to this country for illegal abortions. They could not have them in Spain, and no doubt they were among the late abortion figures. Spain then changed its law, and the last figure I have, for 1988, was that that figure of 22,000 women from Spain had come down to 3,000. Figures change as other countries change their law and as the availability of abortion becomes uniformly more accessible throughout Europe.

Mr. Alton rose --

Sir David Steel : I shall give way when I have finished this point, and my hon. Friend may feel even more inclined to interrupt when he hears my next point. One figure that inflates British abortion figures is the number of women who have to come over from both parts of Ireland--from the Republic, the figure is 3,000 and from Northern Ireland, it is 1,500.

Mr. Alton : Of those women who have children in southern and Northern Ireland, those figures represent a tiny percentage. I hope that my right hon. Friend will tell the House that women came from more than 100 different countries to the United Kingdom last year, from as far away as Mongolia and South Africa. That does not suggest a uniformity of law, but that our laws are such that they come to this country because we allow later abortions than anywhere else. Does he agree that the assurance that he gave in the 1967 debates that his legislation would not lead to abortion on demand looks absurd when, at present, one in five pregnancies end in abortion?

Sir David Steel : I shall come to that wider argument in a moment. I have never accepted that the intention of the law in Britain is to provide some sort of worldwide service. The hon. Member for Maidstone made the point that 50 per cent. of the late abortions about which people complain are performed on foreign women who come here because of the accessibility of legal abortions in this country. I do not particularly like that. I should much prefer other countries--they are doing so gradually--to reform their own abortion laws so that women there can seek redress of their difficulties in their own lands. That is a matter for those countries, not for us, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mossley Hill knows, I have never liked the foreign trade in abortions.

What is the state of the law in other countries? It has not been mentioned much in this debate, but in previous debates opponents of the Abortion Act 1967 have repeatedly said--my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Mossley Hill (Mr. Alton) said it again a moment ago--that we allow abortions later here than they do in other countries. That is true in some instances, but it is not the whole truth. Those who keep saying that some of our continental neighbours have upper limits of 10 or 12 weeks should quote the whole of their law. It is based on a completely different tenet : on the right of a woman to request an abortion at up to 10 or 12 weeks. If we changed our law to reflect that idea, as some hon. Members advocate, that would naturally cut out many of the delays

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that occur. But that is not our law ; our laws are different, and we cannot compare them with those that provide obortion on request. Our laws attempted in 1967 to strike a balance--to make a neutral statement--between the rights of the foetus and those of the woman, and left it to two doctors to judge in any given situation and in good faith whether an abortion was necessary. Hon. Members should not take bits of other people's laws and claim that, because other countries set a figure of 10 or 12 weeks, we allow abortions later than they do. Their whole systems are different. So if hon. Members want to argue for a crippling reduction in the availability of abortion here, they ought to follow through the logic and accept that early abortions should be available on request, as some would argue--although that has never been my argument.

It would be a great mistake--this is where I quarrel with the hon. Member for Maidstone--for the House to set aside the opinion of established medical bodies on the issue of setting a limit of 18 weeks. The survey published in The Lancet of 2 December 1989 showed that only 3 per cent. of members of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists favoured a reduction to 18 weeks ; 75 per cent. favoured 24 weeks. The British Medical Associaton is also firmly against 18 weeks and says, correctly, that such a limit would have

"an inequitable and adverse effect on those most in need of having their pregnancies terminated".

The representative professional committee on foetal viability, to which the Minister referred, also stressed in 1985 the harmful effects of setting the limit too low. Its report stated : "late attenders are usually the women in greatest need of help--the very young and socially deprived".

We are not entitled to cast aside all these opinions as though they did not matter, or to pluck out of the air a figure that we think might be better--

Miss Widdecombe : Will the right hon. Gentlemen acknowledge that in 1967 he went against a considerable body of medical opinion and presumably thought it right to do so?

6.15 pm

Sir David Steel : Certainly not ; I do not accept that for a minute. I worked with the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the BMA throughout the passage of the legislation--

Mr. Alton : They were opposed to it.

Sir David Steel : There were differences about bits and pieces of the legislation, but fundamentally these bodies were not opposed to it--

Mr. Alton : Yes, they were.

Sir David Steel : My hon. Friend is beginning to sound like a parrot. The fact is that they did not oppose it. They supported it throughout its passage, and they still do. That is why they study these matters and send recommendations to Members of this House. They are not asking for fundamental changes in the 1967 legislation. There is concern about the rise in the number of abortions, particularly in the past two years. I rather share that concern, but I do not believe that any hon. Member can suddenly arrive at some correct number of abortions. How would one do that? Each case must be assessed under

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the law and considered on its merits. In some cases, I or other hon. Members might not agree with the doctors that an abortion should have been allowed ; in other cases, we might think that they made the wrong decision, but under the law, we leave that decision to two doctors acting in good faith.

My worry about the rise in the number of abortions in the past two years relates not to the practice of the Abortion Act but to the declining standards of availability of family planning in this country. The "World in Action" television programme last night had done a survey of health authorities and found that a third of authorities in England and Wales had been reducing the numbers of family planning clinics for cash reasons. It was said that, in one area, there was a waiting list of 18 months to have vasectomies on the NHS, and there have been instances of local authorities under financial pressure reducing their subscriptions to the Family Planning Association and to Brook Advisory Clinics. Moreover, the new core curriculum in secondary schools leaves little time for non-statutory subjects such as sex education, so the picture is one of a rise in unnecessary abortions.

If this were a less male-dominated House, we should have spent less time over the years debating abortion, and far more time discussing family planning facilities. I am convinced that there is a relationship between the unhappy cuts of the past couple of years and the unfortunate increase in the number of abortions. Whether we are caricatured outside this place as pro or anti-abortion--I do not accept the labels--it should be common ground in the House that Ministers and the Department of Health should pay more attention to that relationship.

Finally, I turn to the time limit, and--

Mr. Beith : My right hon. Friend has dealt with the two-doctor provision of the 1967 legislation. He must surely recognise that, under that provision, late abortions have taken place in circumstances that he would not have contemplated as part of that legislation ; and that the provision has led to a wide range of assumptions, practised by different doctors, of what reasonable circumstances for an abortion are. If he does not recognise that, he does not recognise the significance that many hon. Members attached to the assurances that he gave in 1967.

Sir David Steel : I go this far with my hon. Friend : I certainly accept that there have been cases--I hinted as much a few moments ago--in which doctors have taken decisions on abortion with which I or my hon. Friend would not have agreed, but the fact is that the onus was put on the medical profession to act in good faith.

I may have said this before, but I distinctly remember going, during the passage of the 1967 Act, to see the secretary of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists perform an operation under pre-1967 legislation. When I saw the case notes in the clinic where he was operating, I told him that I had grave doubts about whether he was acting within the law.

Of course there is room for variation in opinion. All we can say is that we have to rely on the ethics of the medical profession to act in good faith. I accept that, just as there are bad Members of Parliament and clergymen, so there are bad doctors. I regret that, and I have never denied it, but in the main the great majority of doctors are carrying out the intentions of the House as enshrined in the 1967 legislation.

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I turn now to the time limits, and I should like to deal in passing with the vexed issue of the situation in Scotland. With great respect to the Minister, I thought that she was not exactly comfortable with this part of her remarks. I stand to be corrected by the Member for Aberdeen, South (Mr. Doran), who is a Scots lawyer, but time limits in Scotland are and always have been a happier subject, legally speaking, than they have been in England. The Infant Life (Preservation) Act does not apply in Scotland ; the common law of Scotland makes child destruction a crime. Fortunately, because no time limit has ever appeared in a Scottish statute, there is a degree of flexibility there which has been helpful as medical science has developed.

There has been no need for such a great debate north of the border. I looked up the figures and found that, in 1987, there were only two abortions at over 24 weeks in Scotland. In 1988, there was only one. The issue hardly arises there. This is a peculiarly English and Welsh problem. I do not wish to enter into nationalistic considerations, but I do not understand why that should be so. The problem does not exist in the law of Scotland, and we are wise to leave well alone there.

For England and Wales, we put the provisions of the 1929 Act into the 1967 one. It is right--the Minister put the point fairly--that medical science has moved on a great deal since 1929 and it is now possible with resuscitation equipment to keep alive at least a small proportion--we should not exaggerate this--of those born between the 24th and 28th week of pregnancy. That is why there has been such deep consideration of the workings of the Abortion Act and the time limit by, among others, the Lane committee, which recommended a reduction to 24 weeks. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the British Medical Association, the 1985 committee to which the Minister referred and the House of Lords Select Committee all recommended 24 weeks.

A wide section of expert opinion appears to have looked into the matter very carefully, and says that there is now a case for reducing the presumption of viability from 28 to 24 weeks. Before I finish on that matter, I again reiterate a point that is widely misunderstood. The fact that there is a presumption of viability in the law at 28 weeks does not mean the reverse. There is no presumption that a foetus is not viable before 28 weeks. That is important.

It is precisely because of that, as the hon. Member for Barking (Ms. Richardson) said, that the medical profession usually allows a two-week safety margin in its judgment below the level that the law states. That is because the profession can be in danger of prosecution even if it is shown that the foetus was below the 28th week of pregnancy. There is no presumption that below that level viability does not exist.

Let us be clear that, whatever decisions we reach, if we go for 24 weeks, which I will support because I think the law should now be changed, we are in practice introducing a clinical procedure in which 22 weeks will become the limit. If we go for 22 weeks the practice will be 20 weeks and so on. That is why I am wholly opposed to 18 weeks or any lower suggestion. That is nothing but a crude attempt to stop the availability of legal abortion to certain categories of women. There is no medical justification for it.

All the expert medical bodies have told us that, whatever the advances in medical science, it will not be

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possible to sustain life at such a low limit, except in occasional cases such as the one that has been widely quoted, where it was suggested that a baby survived at 21 weeks. By and large, the general medical opinion is that it is not possible to get any significant number of babies to survive below the 24th week of pregnancy. That is the simple reason why I believe that that is the right term. Anything lower is simply arbitrary and designed to deny women their rights. It is right that we should have this debate. Hon. Members have been plagued by endless pieces of mail, to put it politely. I in particular have been the target of an extraordinary resurgence of hate mail of the type that I thought I had last seen in the late 1960s. That is life. By and large, the House wishes to come to a conclusion. I shall support the new clause--with some of the amendments, because I do not think that the clause in itself is quite right. I hope that, at the end of the confusion, we will come to a decision and stick to it. There may not be another debate on abortion in this Parliament and, if there is not, the House must turn its attention to the issues of family planning and contraception facilities.

Mr. Cormack : It is a great privilege to follow the right hon. Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale (Sir D. Steel). I do not agree with everything that he said, but I have always admired him and he has always sought to act from the best possible motives. Although the Act that he introduced has not been the signal success that I am sure he wished it to be, no one who has paid any attention at all to this matter could accuse him of having acted for anything other than the social good of the nation as he saw it at the time. I speak with some diffidence because the last time that the House devoted a fair amount of time to abortion, I had the difficult task of chairing the Committee that examined the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Liverpool, Mossley Hill (Mr. Alton).

Ms. Richardson : The hon. Gentleman was a good Chairman.

Mr. Cormack : I am grateful for that intervention because it was a difficult task and one had to be impartial. I hope that I was impartial throughout the sittings of the Committee. Because I chaired that Committee, for two years I have refused to make any public utterance on this subject. I did not think it right to give any sign of sympathy for one side or the other. When I chaired that Committee I learned a great deal from both sides. One of the things that I learned was that people felt passionately and, on occasions, spoke with some intolerance and misunderstanding, sometimes deliberate, of other people's opinions, which did not advance either case very much.

I shall try to explain how I see the matter and how I shall vote. First, the interests of the mother are and must be paramount. If there is any question of a mother's life being at risk, then, faced with the ghastly choice of which life is to be ended, it is important to decide that the mother's life should be preserved.

On the second matter I cannot go all the way with the Roman Catholic Church, much as I admire the courage of the statements on moral absolutes that are made frequently by the Pope. Certain categories of women must always be granted abortions. There can be no debate about cases arising from rape and incest. If a woman or a girl has

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been violated by a member of her own family or by anybody else and a pregnancy that was never wanted or never sought has been thrust upon her, she must have the chance to have the pregnancy terminated. If there is evidence of severe abnormality, the family must have the opportunity to take counsel, to consider, and, if necessary, to decide that termination is the right course. In what I would loosely call certain social categories, after careful consideration it might be in the interests of other members of the family for abortion to be contemplated.

However, we are not considering with sufficient care the sanctity of life. I was in the Members' Post Office on Saturday morning when all the parcels arrived and my initial feeling was of great sympathy for the staff. When I opened my parcel I found a legitimate and graphic piece of campaigning, because nobody disputes that that is what a 20-week-old foetus looks like. [Interruption.] If somebody had been able to produce medical evidence that this was a grotesque mock-up that was totally inaccurate and grossly misleading, it would have been the most obscene piece of campaigning that anyone could indulge in. However, nobody has suggested that. When I was in the Post Office yesterday an hon. Member came in, took his parcel, opened it and threw it in the bin. I could not help thinking that this is what happens to many foetuses.

Over the past 23 years, we have developed a new attitude towards the sanctity of life which accords ill with our constant talk about the need to preserve the quality of life. I do not make the ridiculous mistake of blaming the right hon. Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale for that. That would be absurd. However, I say to him and to other hon. Members that the climate that was partly--and I choose my words carefully-- influenced by his Act has degenerated over the past 20 years. People who would never have contemplated abortion then, would do so now.

6.30 pm

Mrs. Mahon : If I understand the hon. Gentleman, he is suggesting that there are more abortions now because abortion is legal. Can he explain why there were 1.2 million abortions in Romania in 1989, most of them illegal? Obviously, the rich can always buy safe abortions.

Mr. Cormack : For the sake of other hon. Members, I will not be sidetracked to Romania--a country which I have just visited and which is one of the saddest places that I have ever seen. I shall not talk about the obscene antics of the Ceaucesceu regime and the actions that people were driven to during that time. I am talking about our attitude to life. I am trying to put my case with a degree of calmness and moderation-- [Interruption.] I hope that the hon. Lady will accept that I understand how passionately she feels. I know that she was a member of the nursing profession and must have just as great a concern for life as I have -- [Interruption.] We view these matters differently, but she must allow me to develop my speech. I hope that she will have the opportunity to make her speech later. I was not defending back-street abortions. I understand why the right hon. Gentleman introduced his Bill--he wanted to combat a terrible social evil. The choice to have an abortion must always be traumatic, and the right hon. Gentleman wanted to introduce a Bill that would make abortion available under proper clinical conditions for

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those who needed it. I am suggesting that, unwittingly, his Act has helped to create a climate in which people do not have so great a regard for the sanctity of human life.

Mrs. Mahon : Rubbish.

Mr. Cormack : I do not think that it is rubbish. This is what I mean by the intolerance that these arguments sometimes provoke. The hon. Lady cannot solve the problem or salve her conscience--or, indeed, anyone else's conscience--by shouting, "Rubbish." People now have a much less serious regard for the really important decisions of life. We must recognise that, which is why

Ms. Mildred Gordon (Bow and Poplar) : Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is because mothers are concerned about the quality of life for their whole families that they have abortions? Women sometimes feel that they cannot continue with another child, so they have an abortion. The law does not make much difference to them, because history shows that, when abortion was not legal, they went to the back-street abortionists. They risked their lives and the freedom of those who helped them because of their desire to maintain the quality of life for their families.

I can count on my fingers the number of hon. Members who have carried a child to full term or who have had to face a decision on whether to have a foetus aborted. I know that it is hard for hon. Members to understand

The Second Deputy Chairman : Order. The hon. Lady is making a speech, not an intervention. I shall do my best to call her later in the debate.

Mr. Cormack : I gave way because I know that the hon. Member for Bow and Poplar (Ms. Gordon) has strong feelings. She was on the Committee that I chaired. However, she was not here when I began my speech

Ms. Gordon : I was.

Mr. Cormack : I was trying to be kind to the hon. Lady by suggesting that she might not have heard my earlier points. I said that there were certain social categories where abortion might be right. However, it must never be lightly entered into and the law must not make it easy for that to happen. Currently, the law makes it too easy.

On the question of how and at what point, I refer hon. Members to the model foetus that we were all sent. It showed a well formed, recognisable human body. When I intervened in my hon. Friend the Minister's speech, the substance of my question to her might not have been immediately clear. I asked how many women miscarried after 20 weeks. She said, quite honestly, that she did not know. My point, which I hoped hon. Members had understood, was that most women who carried a child up to 20 weeks went on to deliver that child. Most 20-week foetuses develop into healthy babies. That point was alluded to, very fairly, by the right hon. Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale, and it needs emphasising.

It is often said that we live in a throwaway society, and we do. We are always throwing things away. We do not pay sufficient regard to our environment. When we are chided and upbraided by members of the Green party, many of us deserve it, and I do not exempt myself. However, we must not allow that throwaway mentality to extend to the most important areas of life and lead to the throwing away of life itself.

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Sir David Steel : I do not deny that there is something in what the hon. Gentleman says, because the subject of abortion is now more open to discussion and, perhaps, is being treated too trivially. I hope that he will accept that there is a reverse side to the coin. It was well put to me by a friend who was a medical student at Edinburgh when I was a student there. He is now in general practice. He said that one of the effects of the 1967 legislation has been that people will come to his surgery and discuss abortion with him, whereas pre-1967 they would not have done so and he would have lost control of what was happening, and the patient might have ended up with a back-street abortion or going into a private clinic. That is the other side of the hon. Gentleman's argument.

Mr. Cormack : I entirely accept that. The right hon. Gentleman has made a fair point, and I acknowledge it. All the right is not on one side and all the wrong on the other. I know that the right hon. Gentleman is a devout and convinced Christian--so, I hope, am I. Because we are both Christians we both believe in sin and we are both sinners. Neither of us can be right all the time. I would never suggest that one must believe in no abortion if one is to be a Christian. That is nonsense. I must not refer to yesterday's debate or I shall be called to order. However, yesterday there was a tendency to polarise. In The Times yesterday there was an article by the Archbishop of York who, whatever else he might be, cannot be called anything other than a totally convinced, committed and devout Christian. He is a far better man than I am.

My beliefs make me feel that there is a less deep regard for the sanctity of human life than I would wish. I know that many people in the House and outside do not share the Christian beliefs held by the right hon. Gentleman and myself. However, we still live in a country that has an established Church--

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