Pro-choice campaigners are planning to use an international conference this autumn to urge legal change to ease restrictions governing abortion in Britain.
The Global Safe Abortion Conference, being held by Marie Stopes International in October, just days before the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act, is being viewed by a coalition of pro-choice charities as a platform to press for reform.
The Voice for Choice group of 13 organisations will use the London event to highlight proposed changes, including an end to the requirement for two doctors' signatures to have an abortion and permitting licensed nurses or midwives to carry out some abortion procedures.
The conference was called an "overt political gesture" by a pro-life umbrella group.
It is being billed by pro-choice campaigners as "a seminal event and a call to action" that will "move forward" the domestic abortion agenda as well as calling for global moves to make access to the procedure easier.
It represents a shift by pro-choice groups in Britain, who until now have not actively sought a high-profile debate on legal change amid concerns that doing so risked provoking further counter-campaigning by pro-life groups.
However, battle lines are now being drawn on both sides after the government acknowledged that the forthcoming Human Tissues and Embryos Bill - published in draft form - could potentially be used as a vehicle to change abortion law.
Pro-life campaigners are expected to seek to amend the bill, probably to attempt to bring down the time limit for abortion from 24 weeks - a reform they argue is necessary because scientific advances mean a foetus is now viable earlier.
If they do so, it is likely that pro-choice parliamentarians would respond with opposing amendments aimed at easing restrictions on abortion access.
The expected debate on abortion this autumn will be heightened by an inquiry by the Commons science and technology committee examining the latest scientific developments relating to abortion, which is due to report at the end of October.
The Marie Stopes conference, expected to be addressed by a government minister and Lord Steel, architect of the abortion act, will not produce model legislation, but will highlight a series of objectives, organisers claim. "They are what we feel is a minimal requirement to modernise the law and bring it into the 21st century," said the charity's spokesman, Tony Kerridge.
Campaigners say a woman should need only one doctor's signature to obtain an abortion at any point the procedure is permitted. This goes further than the doctors' body, the British Medical Association, which at its conference in June said one signature was sufficient only in the first trimester.
They also want an end to the restriction that only doctors can perform abortions, arguing that non-surgical procedures including medical abortion via the abortion pill could be carried out by trained nurses. Pro-choice campaigners also want abortion rights extended to Northern Ireland.
Ann Furedi, chief executive of the sexual healthcare charity British Pregnancy Advisory Service, called for "practical modernisation of the law". She said: "Much was achieved by the 1967 Act, but subsequent advances in medical care mean that the 40-year-old law is in some ways holding us back from providing the optimum care we could do. We need modernisation. "
Pro-life organisations say recent figures show abortion levels have risen to 200,000 a year in the UK and argue that the practice is already used too widely. Josephine Quintavalle of Alive and Kicking, an alliance of pro-life charities and church groups, called the conference "an overt political gesture", and said its supporters were worried.
"They are at last realising that contrary to the position they are taking, the country is much more favourable to our position, which is to reduce the number of abortions.
"People are horrified when they hear how the figures continue to rise."
