House of Commons Committee Embraces
Full Abortion-on-Demand Agenda -- Part Three of Three

As feared, an influential House of Commons committee has retained all the worse parts of England’s abortion law and undermined what few limitations still exist. Committee members did so by enthusiastically approving emerging abortion technologies and by ignoring all the clear evidence that babies younger than 24 weeks gestation can survive and that babies at 20 weeks can experience pain.

The influential House of Commons science and technology committee supposedly reviewed the scientific literature before retaining the current 24-week limit on abortion. (The limitation does not apply if the baby is found to have disabilities.)

In addition, the committee recommended eliminating the requirement that two doctors sign forms before an abortion is performed. There was much discussion about pediatricians’ time being “too valuable” to bother with this requirement.

The committee also recommends allowing nurses and midwives to carry “out all stages of early medical abortions--involving the use of drugs [such as RU486]--and early surgical abortions,” as the Times of London euphemistically explained the recommendation. The physicians-only requirement was described by one liberal committee MP as “the old-fashioned ban.”

Nadine Dorries, a Tory and a former nurse, joined forces with another Tory Bob Spink, to attempt to overturn the disastrous recommendations by a series of amendments in a minority report.

Ms Dorries told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "If a woman enters a hospital and that hospital has a neonatal unit where she can be provided with care and she has pre-term delivery below 24 weeks, the baby has a good chance of survival.” In the interview she highlighted a fundamental flaw in the report: reliance on out-of-date data.

"Unfortunately, the committee was informed by a report that was 10 years old and averages out the figures from every hospital in the country, whether or not that hospital even has a paediatrician present, never mind a neonatal unit,” she said.

Likewise, Ms Dorries added, the fetal pain evidence heard by the committee “dated back to before 2003, even though more recent research demonstrated that a foetus could experience pain below 24 weeks,” the Guardian reported.

Making the majority recommendations even more incomprehensible is (as the Times of London described it) that “The committee heard evidence from more than 20 witnesses during the course of its inquiry. It followed advances in care for premature babies and widespread public interest after the release of 3D images showing foetuses apparently ‘walking in the womb’ at 12 weeks.”

The study will now be part of a larger debate in the House of Commons. October represented the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act. Some 200,00 babies are aborted each year, a nearly four-fold increase from the loss of life the first year the law took full effect.

Part One
Part Two