‘Considering Abortion? Free Pregnancy Testing Information & Advisory Service, Quick & Confidential.’

If you read this statement in an advert, for a service listed under ‘Abortion Clinics’, what would you think? If you were pregnant and needed advice, you might give them a ring.

Unfortunately, what the Albany Women’s Centre, who posted this advert at Yell.com, failed to mention is that they don’t offer any medical services and they are, in fact, opposed to abortion in principle. Today, following a complaint made by the charity Education for Choice, the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the Albany ad was misleading and must not appear again in its current form.

This could be dismissed as a single rogue example, were it not for the fact that anti-choice groups operate networks of pregnancy advice centres around the country. Under proposals currently under consideration by the Department of Health, organisations like this one could be given NHS contracts to provide their own special brand of ‘independent advice and counselling’ to women seeking abortion.

This most recent anti-choice saga began in March, when Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries and former Labour minister Frank Field tabled amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill.  Their proposals would require GPs to arrange pre-abortion advice and counselling, removing this responsibility from abortion providers on the grounds that they have a vested financial interest in withholding information about the health risks involved in abortion and encouraging women to proceed with terminations.

This ignores the fact that organisations like Marie Stopes and BPAS, which provide abortions under contract to the NHS, are charities: they have no profit motive here.  It ignores evidence that around 20% of women decide not to have an abortion after receiving counselling from BPAS. And it ignores the fact that abortion providers are highly regulated, licensed by the Department of Health, and are required to follow clinical guidance on telling women exactly what the possible risks and complications of abortion are.

Instead, in the name of ‘informed consent’ and our Right to Know, women will be directed to unlicensed, unregulated counselling organisations, which are under no obligation to provide medically accurate information or offer unbiased advice, and which do not have to disclose an ideological opposition to abortion.

In the past week we have learned that the Department of Health is considering implementing the Dorries-Field proposals via statutory instrument, without legislation, debate or parliamentary oversight which, for such a significant and potentially damaging change, is definitely cause for alarm.

These calls for abortion counselling change have not come in isolation.  In recent months we have seen a stream of measures signalling a distinct change of direction from the government on reproductive rights issues.

At the end of May it was announced that LIFE, an organisation which is opposed to abortion in all circumstances and which does not provide any sexual health services, had been appointed to the government’s newly formed Sexual Health Forum, and will now be advising on health policy. The Department of Health justifies the group’s appointment (and the exclusion of abortion-provider BPAS) in the name of providing ‘balance’ on the panel – although one would have thought that a commitment to scientific accuracy and contraceptive access would be a more appropriate criterion for selection.

Then there was Nadine Dorries’ high profile campaign for girls only abstinence-based sex education. While few of us will have missed her media blitz (cf the ‘paedophile pound’, padded bras for seven year olds, condoms on bananas etc.), the equally alarming news that Education Secretary Michael Gove is supporting the newly formed SRE Council may have passed you by.

While the Council’s stated purpose is “to promote the best possible sex and relationship education both at home and at school”, its membership raises some serious questions about the kind of information it plans to provide.

The group includes ‘Lovewise’ a charity which “seeks to help schools and youth groups by providing presentations on the subjects of marriage, sex and relationships from a Christian perspective”; it also includes ‘Evaluate’ which “supports [young people] in delaying sexual experience until a long-term committed exclusive relationship”. US Christian group the Silver Ring Thing is in there too, making sure that teens are aware that “abstinence until marriage is not only God’s plan for their lives, but also the best and only way to avoid the harmful physical and emotional effects of premarital sex.”

The ‘SRE Council’ then: long on abstinence and Christianity and short on evidence-based information and non-directive support. And yet it has the backing of the man in charge of the nation’s education system.

One final example: in April Conservative-run Richmond Council awarded the Catholic Children’s Society an £89,000 contract to provide support to young people on unplanned pregnancy, contraception, abortion and homophobic bullying. The award came at the expense of Off the Record, a small local charity which has been providing confidential counselling to teenagers in the borough for 20 years.

Just to be clear, the Catholic Children’s Society’s work is based on “Christian values derived from the Gospels and the teaching of the Catholic church”.

The award is entirely in keeping with the government’s localism agenda, which seeks greater involvement of voluntary and religious groups in the delivery of public services, such as… pre-abortion counselling.

Readers may see a pattern developing here.  Again and again, organisations that rely on scientifically accurate, evidence-based information and provide non-judgemental services are being replaced with groups which are ideologically driven, religious and partisan.

In the past we have seen many outright attacks on the abortion time limit and on the right to choose as a whole.  Today’s attacks are of a different nature.  They seek to chip away at the edges of reproductive rights, with a series of small but far-reaching measures that can be publicly presented as eminently reasonable and even empowering to women.  But they signal a change of approach and a change of climate – they tell us that our rights are not safe in this government’s hands.

That’s why the abortion-related amendments to the Health and Social Care bill recently tabled by Nadine Dorries and Frank Field are more problematic – because superficially they sound reasonable.

The amendments propose that women seeking abortion should receive counselling from an organisation that does not itself provide terminations, and that the body charged with drawing up clinical guidelines for abortion care should not itself be linked to abortion-providers.  Counselling for women with unplanned pregnancy? Good idea.  Unbiased clinical guidelines? Of course.

Anti-choice campaigners aren’t stupid.  They know from the experience of their American counterparts that hardline anti-abortion measures couched in moderate language have greater resonance with the public.  Later term abortion in the US? Re-christened ‘partial-birth abortion’ and promptly banned.

So Nadine Dorries tells us she is neither pro-choice nor ‘pro-life’ but simply ‘pro-woman’.  Her campaign around these amendments is called Right to Know.  Women have a right to know the ‘real risks’, both physical and mental, associated with abortion which, it is claimed, are currently being deliberately withheld from them by the abortion-industry.  The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ clinical guidelines on the care of women seeking abortion cannot be trusted because it too is part of this ‘industry’. Everyone, it seems, has a vested interest in encouraging more women to have more abortions.

But the boring fact of the matter is that none of this is actually true. Informed consent from the patient is required before any medical procedure, including abortion, can be carried out.  Clinicians are required to discuss all potential risks and complications, both physical and psychological.  Abortion in the UK is already thoroughly regulated – let’s not forget, it’s the only procedure that requires the permission of two doctors before it can go ahead.

Bpas (the British Pregnancy Advisory Service), which is one of the UK’s largest abortion-providers and therefore the main target of Ms Dorries ire, reports that around 20% of women decide not to go ahead with termination following the counselling they receive.  It’s also a registered charity which carries out 90% of its procedures under contract to the NHS, and is licensed by the Secretary of State for Health to do so.

The problem facing anti-choice campaigners such as Dorries is that the clinical facts about the ‘real risks’ of abortion do not accord with their view of what women should be told about the procedure.  When carried out legally in a clinical setting, as it is the in the UK, abortion is a very safe procedure; the risks of complication are small, but women are still informed about them, as they should be.  In terms of mental health, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists finds (in its new draft guidelines) that “the great majority of women who have abortions do not experience adverse psychological [consequences]”.

It is not unreasonable to trust the members of the RCOG to have used the most up-to-date evidence at their disposal and to have the best interests of their patients at heart.  Nor is it unreasonable for those drawing up such guidelines to themselves be involved with the provision of abortion.  In fact, I rather hope that they would be involved.

Advice provided by medical bodies about other types of procedure does not attract this kind of criticism.  Private healthcare providers in other areas of medicine are accepted as offering unbiased opinion, although they most certainly do so in a for-profit capacity (in fact the Conservative Party actually seems quite keen on seeing more of this).

Requiring women to undergo further mandatory counselling, is both unnecessary and insulting to women.  It presumes that women are incapable of making up their own minds when presented with the clinically relevant facts and ultimately seeks to delay and deter women from having abortion.

What does ‘independent advice and counselling’ as sought by Dorries et al actually mean? Where will it come from? In the United States, compulsory counselling means that in some areas women are given grossly inaccurate information about abortion’s links to breast cancer and infertility, some are required to listen to a detailed description of the foetus or view ultrasound pictures before they are allowed to proceed.  Counselling at the hands of anti-choice Crisis Pregnancy Centres most certainly will not result in genuinely ‘informed’ consent.

Debate on abortion is not solely driven by scientific evidence on either side.  The pro-choice movement deals with human and gender rights, bodily autonomy, need and circumstance. But here we are talking simply about what women should be told before having an abortion, and if we ignore mainstream medical opinion because it does not tally with our personal ideological viewpoint, and then seek to enact those views into law, then we are in dangerous, and not at all reasonable, territory.

So, a victory for Irish women, the pro-choice movement and for common sense, then?  Well, to a certain extent it is. The case has put Ireland’s outdated abortion laws under the international media spotlight; it has provided legal redress, and €15,000 compensation, to the woman involved, ‘C’, who became pregnant while suffering from a rare form of cancer and who feared for her own and her child’s life if she continued with the pregnancy; and it will force the Irish government at the very least to clarify the circumstances in which abortion can be carried out legally in the Republic of Ireland.

But the case also demonstrates just how far Ireland has to go before it fully recognises the injustice and hardship caused by its draconian abortion laws, which are among the most restrictive in Europe.

The procedure remains illegal in the Republic in almost all circumstances. Technically there is a right to access termination where there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the pregnant woman from carrying a baby to term.  In practice, the lack of clarity over when this rule applies, and the ever-present risk of criminal prosecution faced by the woman seeking termination and the doctor advising her,  means that the right cannot be exercised with any degree of confidence.  It is this issue which the Irish government will now be forced to address.

But there are far wider human rights violations at stake here:  the two other complainants in the ECHR case are in fact more representative of the broader injustice faced by Irish woman seeking to access abortion services.

The first woman, ‘A’, is a recovering alcoholic whose children had been taken into care and who felt that having another child would jeopardise her chances of reuniting her family. She borrowed from a money-lender to cover the cost of travelling to a private clinic in London.  Woman ‘B’ was unmarried and was not prepared to become a single parent.

The court rejected the claims of both these women that having to travel abroad to access abortion had violated their human rights.  And in all three cases it rejected their claims that the psychological and physical burden they suffered as a result had constituted inhuman or degrading treatment.

Indeed the court explicitly endorsed the prohibition of abortion in Ireland as based on the “profound moral values of the Irish people in respect of the right to life of the unborn” and “struck a fair balance between the right of the …applicants to respect of their private lives and the rights invoked on behalf of the unborn”.

Here’s the reality of the situation: last year around 4,500 women travelled to England and Wales from the Republic of Ireland seeking abortions in private clinics.  Each of them had to find between €400 and €1500 for the cost of the termination alone.  When the cost of flights, accommodation, time off work and childcare are factored in, many, like Woman ‘A’, are forced to turn to money lenders to meet the expense.

Beyond this, the stigma around abortion in Ireland, where the Church remains a major  force in public life, is so great that many women are unable to tell those closest to them what they are going through.

The extreme circumstances faced by Woman ‘C’ were undoubtedly traumatic.  But the vast majority of Irish women seeking abortion face less sensational but equally distressing situations.  These ‘run-of-the-mill’ cases never make the headlines: women with families who simply can’t afford another child, young women trying to finish their education; issues of job loss, divorce, bereavement and caring responsibilities that everyone will experience at some point in their lives, but which are compounded by unplanned pregnancy, and made catastrophic by the cost, distress and secrecy involved in having to travel abroad to access termination.

So far the Irish government’s response to the court ruling has been lukewarm. Irish Health Minister Mary Harney has indicated there will be no legislative change before the General Election in February or March, and was ‘reassured’ that the Irish constitutional position had been protected.  Taoseach Brian Cowan observed yesterday, “I don’t think we can jump to any quick conclusion”.

The Irish government has spent almost two decades failing to clarify the grounds for legal abortion after the Supreme Court advised it to do so in 1992, there seems little danger of a rush to judgement.  So, for the time being Ireland will continue to export its ‘abortion problem’ to the UK and claim its stance reflects the ‘moral values’ of its people.

Women from the Republic of Ireland form the vast majority of those who come to England and Wales seeking abortions.  But guess who’s at No. 2 on the list? Northern Ireland.

Last year, 1,123 women from Northern Ireland made the same trek as their counterparts from the Republic to private clinics on the mainland, facing the same financial and emotional costs and the same stigma and secrecy.

Abortion in Northern Ireland is almost as restricted as it is south of the border, and its regulations similarly opaque.  The only difference is that under the 1967 Abortion Act, the procedure is legal – and therefore safe – in the rest of the UK.  Northern Irish women are British citizens and they are being forced to pay for a procedure which is legally available to women elsewhere in the UK free of charge.

Abortion law in the North is even governed by the same legislation as in the Republic: the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act.  And that’s something that should make politicians in Belfast – and Westminster – take notice.  As Audrey Simpson, Director of FPA Northern Ireland said yesterday:

“This landmark judgement sends a very strong message to the Northern Ireland Assembly that the law governing abortion in Northern Ireland is inadequate as well, and needs to be changed to comply with the European Convention on Human Rights.  It is no longer the case of ‘if’ the law should be changed, but rather ‘when’.”