Peter Oborne
The Daily Mail

Abortion is the only event that modern liberals think too violent and obscene to portray on TV.

This is not because they are squeamish or prudish.

It is because if people knew what abortion really looked like, it would destroy their pretence that it is a civilised answer to the problem of what to do about unwanted babies.

Last week a ministerial replicant called Dawn Primarolo, an early and rather unconvincing product of the New Labour apparatchik factory, set her face against any changes in the law on this subject.

She is wrong.

Put on one side the basic morality of abortion. It’s important but it won’t get us anywhere right now.

Let’s think, instead, about whether abortion supporters should be prepared to amend the 1967 law that got us where we are today.

Even Lord Steel, author of that Act, now has the courage to admit that there are now too many abortions.

Now, here’s an interesting thing that most people don’t know. Lord Steel’s Act did not, in fact, legalise abortions in this country. It just made them much, much easier.

They were already legal, and had been since the trial of Dr Aleck Bourne in 1938 established that a serious danger to the mother’s health was a complete defence to criminal charges.

Dr Bourne had operated on a 14-year-old girl gangrapedby soldiers and had then reported himself to the police. He was triumphantly acquitted.

By 1962, 2,800 legal abortions were being carried out each year in NHS hospitals, with many more in private clinics.

But the difference was that any doctor who acted for what the courts regarded as inadequate reasons faced prosecution, prison and ruin.

The new law was much laxer and doctors knew it was.

Dr Bourne himself, asked to support the change, had refused to do so, saying: “Abortion on demand would be a calamity for womanhood.”

He predicted the ‘greatest holocaust in history’ if the Bill were passed.

He could hardly be dismissed as a callous or inflexible or cowardly person, since he was obviously none of these things. So the abortion lobby have always simply ignored him.

I think it’s time his case, and his arguments, were remembered and reconsidered. It is clear that abortion is now used in many cases as a lazy form of contraception for people who cannot be bothered.

It is particularly shocking that many women seeking abortions have had them at least once before.

Sexual intercourse is usually not compulsory. Everyone now knows how babies are made.

Can this casual, trivialising attitude towards potential human beings be healthy for our society and our respect for life in general?

Can’t we do better than Dawn Primarolo?
(snip)

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