He was a committed opponent of the termination of pregnancy for social reasons and a leading campaigner against the Abortion Act. In short, he refused to perform abortions unless the foetus was very grossly deformed. It is a disheartening paradox that, at a time when there is so much scientific interest in interuterine fetal medicine, there should be such a rising tide of deliberate wastage of healthy unborn life.

We may in fact be approaching an age in which we are more interested in extinguishing early pregnancy than securing its optimum development. It would be a mistake … simply to take a narrow view of … the acceptance of abortion on demand.

A more comprehensive survey would include all the other so-called liberalising pressures towards, for example, wholesale divorce, increasing social neglect of the elderly and helpless culminating in euthanasia, moves to tolerate soft drugs like cannabis, the acceptance of pornography and obscenity, and a queer disregard for the welfare of the very young and unprotected.

It is not an age to be proud of. Donald employed his celebrated ultrasound images as a powerful resource in the abortion arena. In a speech he made to a lay audience on an anti-abortion platform, he showed one of the earliest real-time films of fetal movement:.

She does not even know she is pregnant. She certainly cannot feel these movements but there is no doubt about the reality, …now you see it move its hand up to its face you see his head is up here and his chest is down here then he throws his legs out and his arms … As Malcolm Nicolson points out, Donald draws from such identifiable individuality a strong moral message:. Anybody who says this is not alive is talking through his neck. It is a lie, which is intolerable and seeing is believing … There can be no argument about it and if I have done nothing else in my life, I have killed that dirty lie that the foetus is just a nondescript meaningless jelly, disposable at will, something to be got rid of.

In the Queen Mother Hospital, it is said that Donald would sometimes show ultrasound images to women seeking abortions in a deliberate attempt to deter them from their chosen course of action. However, it was not just Donald controlling Glasgow abortion policies. Of the criticisms of the way the Act was working, which began almost as soon as the legislation came into force, a disproportionate number came from the West of Scotland. MPs there were said to be under heavy constituency pressure to reverse much of the liberalising effect of the Act, according to Lancet commentaries.

As a result of an abortion performed at Stobhill Hospital, a baby was thought to be dead on delivery and was, routinely, sent for incineration. It was, however, later heard to whimper by a member of staff in the boiler room.

The baby was returned to theatre and subsequently transferred to the paediatric ward where, in spite of the efforts made to save his life, he died some nine hours after delivery. Thus M. Aberdeen and Glasgow seem to epitomise the two polar opposites of abortion practice in Scotland at this time. The preservation of life at all costs is surely not the point.

Rather as doctors we should be concerned with the relief of human suffering. Those who supported the former view argued that they were being true to their vocation by preventing ill-health.

It is noticeable that apart from assuming that only the doctor can determine what is medical, the boundaries between medical and non-medical were unspecified. Baird, in fact, suggested that the distinction was untenable. The doctor was being asked to enter into spheres on the periphery of medical knowledge. To conclude, broadly speaking there is a clear medicalisation of abortion within the policy-making process throughout the later twentieth century. Nonetheless, as my research is beginning to reveal, that process could be very geographically uneven in the post-war period, as well as being forced upon the profession to a large extent.

Individual personalities such as Baird established a bridgehead of medical interventionism in sexual health far in advance of the main body of the British medical establishment, who continued to question the propriety of such interventionism both in terms of medical ethics and professional status.

Figures like Ian Donald, on the other hand, reveal very clearly the tension between personal values and professional duty, articulating his own social and cultural values in this morally and politically charged arena.

Let us remember that Baird deliberately moved from Glasgow to Aberdeen in search of an environment that was more suited to his personal values and professional ambitions. However, the fact remains that for two geographically close cities with broadly similar social make-ups, both located within an identical legal framework, the s witnessed dramatically different practical interpretations of abortion policy.

Representative Todd Akin R-Missouri caused a political firestorm this August when he told a television reporter that he opposes abortion in all circumstances because "legitimate rape" rarely leads to pregnancy. Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney quickly distanced his own pro-life views from Akin's, and President Barack Obama reiterated his commitment to not make "health care decisions on behalf of women.

Politicians frequently use their stances on abortion to elicit electoral support, and this election year is no different. Abortion is again a major point of divisive debate in presidential and congressional races. And state legislative efforts to restrict abortion access are currently under way in twelve states. The Republican Party platform calls for a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortions but makes no explicit mention of whether exceptions would be made for cases of rape and incest.

Romney has indicated in several interviews that he supports the repeal of Roe v. Across the Atlantic, the abortion issue seldom garners such rapt attention. As members of national health insurance plans, most Western European women enjoy access to elective abortion services—also called abortion on demand. While there are significant regional differences in abortion policies and political discourse, abortion is rarely a point of contention during elections. Abortion practices, debates, and laws initially developed quite similarly in Europe and the U.

While Europeans continued to believe that abortion was a desperate act of unfortunate women, some powerful Americans began to argue that abortion was an immoral act of sinful women. These divergent perceptions of abortion and the women who have them still affect abortion debates and legislation on both sides of the Atlantic.

Historically, abortion policy has revolved around three main players: government officials, women, and medical practitioners. The historical record also shows that, for thousands of years, women have limited the number of the children they bore through pregnancy prevention, abortion, and infanticide.

Abortion was only recently outlawed, and then only for a period of roughly years. When women did not have legal access to abortion services they still found ways albeit often unsafe ways to end unwanted pregnancies. For most of Western history, aborting an early pregnancy was considered a private matter controlled by women and was not a crime.

At the turn of the nineteenth century most people in Western Europe and the United States did not believe human life was present until a pregnant woman felt the first fetal movements, a phenomenon referred to as quickening. Before quickening, women thought about pregnancy in terms of a lack of something menstruation rather than the presence of something a fetus. In an effort to restore their monthly periods, they took herbal abortifacients such as savin, pennyroyal, and ergot, which they often found in their own gardens.

They did not consider such practices abortion. In fact, the word abortion was confined to miscarriages that occurred after quickening. Medical doctors had trouble even verifying a pregnancy until the woman reported that quickening had occurred. Religious authorities such as the Roman Catholic Church also supported the idea that the soul was not present until a later stage of pregnancy.

Although not official church doctrine, this belief was based on St. Augustine's fifth-century interpretation of Aristotle, that the soul enters the body only after the body is fully formed—some 40 days after conception for males and 80 days for females. Laws reflected this distinction between the quick and the nonquick fetus. In the United States and England, abortion was legal in the early s as long as it was performed prior to quickening. During later stages of pregnancy, abortion was a crime, but distinct from other forms of murder and punished less harshly.

It was very difficult to prove that a woman accused of abortion had ever felt the fetus move. Even in infanticide cases, the court often had to rely on the accused woman's testimony to know whether the child had died in utero or had been born full-term and alive. When Margaret Rauch was put on trial in Pennsylvania in for a suspected infanticide, she testified that the baby "used to move before, but did not move after [she fell during the pregnancy].

At this time, the pregnant woman had significant power in defining pregnancy and the law was based on her bodily experience. By the mids women from all walks of life aborted pregnancies, and abortion services had grown more widely available.

As the professionalization and commercialization of medicine began, more abortion options became available to the women who could afford to pay for them. Poor women—especially unmarried ones—continued to use herbs to abort unwanted pregnancies, and could purchase abortifacients from pharmacists through the mail. If those drugs failed they could go to the growing number of practices that used medical instruments to induce abortions. In the late nineteenth century, American and European doctors, social reformers, clergy members, and politicians made abortion into a social, political, and religious issue.

Women's experiences of quickening were discredited as unscientific and medical doctors became the recognized experts on pregnancy and fetal development. Quickening lost credibility as a valid indication of fetal life when doctors lobbied state governments to change laws to reflect their new way of thinking.

By , Western European countries and the United States had outlawed abortion during all stages of pregnancy. The U. British criminalization began with Lord Ellenborough's act of and was fully realized when Parliament passed the Offenses Against the Person Act in Abortion was outlawed state-by-state in the U. Abortion was also considered a criminal act in most of Western Europe, with many of the laws originating in the Napoleonic legal code.

During the last half of the nineteenth century, social scientists began to publish statistics comparing birth rates among nations. As nationalism and imperialism intensified tensions between European countries, these numbers took on new significance. Statesmen feared that if women chose to have fewer children then this would decrease their nation's ability to compete in modernized warfare. Anxiety racked French politicians when they learned France's birth rate had fallen nearly a third between and , while its neighbor and recent and future enemy Germany's had barely changed at all.

The idea that women needed to give birth to as many children as possible spread contagiously. Ludwig Quessel captured the dire essence of this worry when he said: "A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of a birth-strike.

Concerns arose in Europe and the U. The visible use of abortion by white, middle-class women seemed to threaten the status of their male counterparts and "white" positions of power. As Theodore Roosevelt put it in , women of "good stock" who refused to have children were "race criminals. Increased scrutiny of pregnancy and childbirth coincided with a push by medical doctors to increase their professional influence.

Because of the variety of abortion methods available to women, trained physicians had little control over this area of what they considered medical science.

In the United States, the newly created American Medical Association AMA initiated an antiabortion campaign in as part of its efforts to professionalize and to restrict competition from homeopaths and midwives.

They lobbied for the criminalization of abortion, capitalizing on fears that not enough white, native-born women were having children. Doctors claimed there was little difference between a quick and a nonquick fetus and that earlier and later stages of pregnancy were not distinct.

In doing so, they redefined the meaning of abortion to include early stages of pregnancy. AMA doctors discredited women's experiences of quickening as unscientific and emotional. Noted AMA physician and antiabortion advocate Dr. Horatio Storer quipped in his book Why Not? American doctors joined forces with religious authorities to pass antiabortion laws. While politicians denied women's reproductive rights were being used as bargaining chips in a backroom deal, the episode revealed scant concern for the right of a democratically elected Parliament to debate a matter of profound importance and significant controversy.

The result is the retention of legislation grounded in tired stereotypes of women's inability to make important decisions in a serious and reflective way. It would be lamentable if one consequence of the fictitious abortion requests made by the Telegraph were to add fuel to this view, implying that real women's requests for abortion are.

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