Nurses should be allowed to carry out abortions to speed up the process and defuse growing controversy over terminations late in pregnancy, according to family planning chiefs.
Waiting times to end a pregnancy could be cut by letting more junior staff oversee 'medical abortions' - drugs that induce a miscarriage - or simple surgery such as the vacuum procedure, says the Family Planning Association.
Under current law, only doctors can perform a termination. But the FPA chief executive, Anne Weyman, said the law was restricting NHS provision and forcing women to delay until later in pregnancy when terminations are more traumatic.
Weyman said: 'Nurses would have to be trained and properly supported to do it, but it means you would get a larger pool of professionals you could call on.
'Abortions under 10 weeks are so much safer and less intrusive. The longer she goes, the more she suffers.' Some women were waiting up to seven weeks for an NHS appointment, she said.
Next month the High Court will hear a landmark case challenging two doctors' decision to grant an abortion because the baby had a cleft palate. Judges will rule on what constitutes a severe enough handicap to end pregnancy, and on whether a baby of 24 weeks - the current legal limit for abortion unless there is serious abnormality - has a right to life independent from its mother's rights.
A victory for 'pro-life' groups would radically restrict abortion rights in Britain. Weyman argues that it would have 'severe consequences', particularly for women with wanted pregnancies who discover late on that the baby is severely malformed.
Last week Lord Steel, who as a Liberal MP led moves to legalise abortion in 1967, suggested a compromise. He said that in return for offering abortion on demand at up to 12 weeks - scrapping current requirements for two doctors to agree to a termination - there should be tougher criteria governing later terminations done on grounds of handicap.
With premature babies routinely surviving if born at 24 weeks, some doctors now argue that the time limit no longer makes sense.
Weyman, however, warns that this would be a slippery slope: 'You can't compromise with people who have a fundamentalist attitude. They will argue now for a reduction in the upper time limit. If they get one, they will come back with something else.'
The real issue, she insists, is access. The latest figures show that, although the percentage of abortions carried out on the NHS at under 10 weeks rose slightly to 78 per cent in the year to 2002, there were huge variations nationwide.
As few as 18 per cent of NHS abortions were carried out at that stage in south Stoke, 20 per cent in Walsall and 20 per cent in Harlow. The number of abortions carried out at between 13 and 19 weeks also rose slightly across England and Wales. The Department of Health has already announced plans for medical abortions to take place in family planning clinics rather than in hospitals to speed up treatment. But even that outraged anti-abortion groups.
The Health Secretary, John Reid, is also registered as an interested party in the cleft palate case, which will attempt to establish that unborn children have rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said last night that allowing nurses to perform abortions would require a change in the law, adding: 'It's not going to happen in the foreseeable future.'
