In July last year, Evan Harris, health spokesman for the Lib Dems, called for a committee on foetal viability. He's more sensible than Laurence Robertson, Tory MP for Tewkesbury, who in May 2005 called for a ban on abortion altogether. Harris was also more sensible than Liam Fox, who very briefly flirted in the Tory leadership election with the idea of reducing time limits to 12 weeks. The Liberal Democrat was more sensible than Michael Howard, for that matter, who, prior to the general election, let it be known (via Cosmopolitan magazine), that he'd like to see the limit reduced to 20 weeks. This was underpinned by no new information on foetal viability at all. He just scratched around for a number that conveyed distaste for the business of abortion, without being so bold as to lose any pro-choice votes over it.
Still, for all the people Evan Harris was more sensible than, this is still not a sensible proposition. People with a serious interest in reducing the number of late-term abortions that occur in this country go about it from the opposite direction - they campaign to make abortions under 12 weeks more freely available on the NHS (a legitimate NHS procedure, after all - and yet you would be amazed at how often, at a local level, the NHS declines to give abortions before 12 weeks, reasoning rather high-handedly that if you're in that much of a rush, you can pay for it yourself). Furthermore, they would be campaigning, as certain abortion rights groups are, to allow some abortion procedures to be performed by nurses, which, especially in the case of very early terminations done in pill form, would speed everything up considerably. That's what you do if your genuine motivation is to increase the number of abortions happening before 12 weeks which, incidentally, already stands at 85 to 90%, NHS obstructions notwithstanding. The time-limit approach often masquerades as "modernising" - medical advances being what they are, it is now possible for doctors to keep foetuses alive far younger than when the abortion legislation was last fine-tuned. This is absolutely untrue; no significant improvements to foetal viability have been made since the time limit was brought down in 1990 from 28 weeks to the current 24. People who talk about time limits, in other words, have just found a new way of saying "I'm anti-abortion."
In fact, the number of women having abortions at beyond 20 weeks is miniscule, just over 1%. These late-term abortions are almost exclusively because of terrible foetal defects, discovered late on in the pregnancy. Very occasionally, they're down to mental impairment on the part of the mother (either a pre-existing mental illness, or cases of women from very strict religious families getting pregnant and going into denial).
People who use time limits to pushan anti-abortion agenda are fixing on the most vulnerable, traumatised people they could possibly find, and trying to legislate against them. I cannot conceive of a more cowardly position.
And yet, while all this was occurring within Westminster, it seemed pretty unimportant, to be honest - peripheral to everyone, to health care professionals, to people who might be making their own reproductive decisions, to voters, to everyone. Until this weekend, when an Observer-commissioned Mori poll showed only one third of people in favour of keeping the abortion laws as they are, with 42% of people wanting to bring down the time limit. This is a red herring; there is no ethical value to this mawkish fetishisation of the foetus. The time limit "debate" is not a debate - it doesn't have the transparency or frankness to warrant the name. To anyone who wants to peddle an anti-abortion position, well, bring it on - let's have that conversation, openly. But let's stop asking questions about time limits, and stop answering them.
