COMES A TIME?

When nature says no (Mary Kenny, 3/21/05, Times of London)

I HAVE done many interviews about abortion, but one that stays with me most vividly was a conversation with the late Professor Peter Huntingford, an ardent pro-choice campaigner and distinguished obstetrician and gynaecologist.

He said that he passionately believed in a woman’s right to choose, and yet — “there comes a time when it is just too late to terminate a pregnancy”. He then added, with a rather tormented expression: “I know that we can do abortions too late, because I’ve done them too late.”

Once you get past the 20-week gestation point, the operation becomes increasingly distressing because it is so obvious that you are destroying a very small human being. And yet, he had had pregnant women in his surgery who reacted furiously when he said that it was too late — for him — to terminate. Women said it was “illogical” that they could have had an abortion a week previously, at 23 weeks, but not now, at 24 weeks. “Yes, it is illogical,” he conceded. “But that’s the way it is.”