Some time in the spring of 2005, a beautiful sculpture of a disabled, naked, pregnant woman, will be placed on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Marc Quinn's marble work, Alison Lapper Pregnant, has already created a storm of controversy. Some critics regard it as an example of political correctness taken to extremes, and have pointed to the predominantly leftwing flavour of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group.
Yet, paradoxically, the elevation of Alison Lapper to a 15ft statue could be described as a triumph for the pro-life lobby which, 38 years ago, when Alison Lapper was born without arms and with flapper-like legs, was the only group which thought she was entitled to exist. The "leftwing" activists at the time were, with the thalidomide scandal raging, campaigning for people like Alison (whose condition results from a congenital disorder called phocomelia) to be terminated in the womb. Indeed, the majority of the public, back in the mid-60s, felt that the thalidomide drug had inflicted such gross deformities that abortion should be legalised particularly for this purpose.
The thalidomide scandal, moreover, proved to be exactly what the Abortion Law Reform Association (the lobby seeking to legalise abortion) needed to clinch its cause. "The drug thalidomide was the motor that reinvigorated the Abortion Law Reform Association and paved the way for reform," wrote Keith Hindell and Madeleine Simms in Abortion Law Reformed, their comprehensive 1971 account of the change in the law. Up until the thalidomide scandal, the abortion lobby had found it difficult to break through the ingrained public and parliamentary opposition. Alra found its way blocked by respectable opinion - which feared that easy abortion would cause a drop in moral standards - by the pro-life movements, and the influence of the Catholic church.
It had campaigned for legalisation so as to halt the scandal of back-street abortions - which were horribly high in the desperate 30s, when more than 400 women a year died. But by the 60s, deaths from illegal abortions had fallen virtually to zero because of modern antibiotics and because termination was being practiced de facto in hospital conditions (the pre-1967 law allowed for a certain amount of flexible interpretation). Of course, there was a heavy element of hypocrisy, and secrecy, but the British public, or its parliament, were not about to vote merely to remove hypocrisy and secrecy. There was a prevailing view that there should be deterrents to easy abortion.
The notion of "choice" was not an issue in the 60s. This arose after the American debates of the 70s, when "a woman's right to choose" was so successfully marketed as a slogan. Before that, campaigners were anxious to put over serious concerns for hard cases: the over-burdened mother of six or the rape victim. So when the thalidomide scandal struck in the early 60s, it was the secular version of an answer to prayer.
From that moment onwards, the reformers sensed that theirs was no longer a minority movement but had mass support. The case of Sherri Finkbine of Phoenix, Arizona, made particular news in the summer of 1962: she had taken thalidomide early in her pregnancy, and had to fly to Sweden for a termination. Vatican Radio condemned this, but public opinion supported Mrs Finkbine. The cartoonist Trog drew a brilliant cartoon in Private Eye in which a pompous, pinstriped doctor looks down his nose at a distressed young woman: "I'm sorry," he says, "but the ethical position is quite clear - thalidomide was a legal prescription, but what you suggest is an illegal operation."
And so it turned out, just as Hindell and Simms wrote: thalidomide made abortion acceptable. A Daily Mail/NOP opinion poll found that 80% of the public now supported a change in the law for such dreadful deformities. Only the pro-life movements and the Catholic church stubbornly maintained that a thalidomide baby - or any disabled child - still had the right to life, though Hindell and Simms were pleased to note that "under the impact of the harsh reality of this tragedy [of thalidomide], the authority of Catholic dogma silently disintegrated".
Scroll forward some 40 years: and the principle that a child with severe disabilities indeed has the right to live is cast in stone by Alison Lapper Pregnant. The admirable Lapper certainly did have a hard time as a baby. Her birth mother was told that Alison was too ugly to live, and doctors considered her "a cabbage". She was brought up in foster care, but overcame her many difficulties and disadvantages to gain a first in fine art at Brighton University, and to become a delighted mother herself.
Some traditionalists wanted a statue of Elizabeth, the late Queen Mum, on the spare plinth. But as Alison herself remarked lightly, there are enough statues of dead characters there already: "At least I'm alive, and people should celebrate that." And isn't Alison's living, and fertile, status a celebration of human life - and even for the forces of pro-life?
· Mary Kenny is a freelance author and journalist. She is the author of Abortion: The Whole Story
