50 Years of the Abortion Act

The Moral Maze returns with a special programme marking 50 years of the Abortion Act, recorded in front of an audience of students at University College London. Under the 1967 law, terminations were made legal for the first time in limited circumstances, with the agreement of two doctors. In practice this has meant that it has not usually been difficult to get an abortion in the first 6 months of pregnancy. The technology has changed: the threshold at which a baby has a good chance of surviving outside the womb has decreased, so at 23 weeks' gestation, one foetus might be aborted while another is put in intensive care. Social attitudes have changed and many doctors now support the official line of the British Medical Association which wants abortion to be decriminalised completely. So is it time for abortion to be treated like any other medical procedure that is regulated by the General Medical Council? On the other side of the dispute are those who say the Act has been too liberally interpreted. With nearly 200,000 abortions a year in the UK, they say we effectively have 'abortion on demand' and they want the law to be tightened to protect the rights of 'pre-born children' and their mothers. Whatever the details of time-limits and interpretation of the law, the moral dividing line remains as deeply-etched as it was in 1967: it is between those who think a human life starts at conception and those who don't. The Moral Maze has teamed up with Dundee University's Centre for Argument Technology. For the first time, researchers will analyse the debate and use the data to create an interactive web page called "Test your argument", hosted by the BBC's experimental site "Taster" and available via the Radio 4 website after the broadcast. Producer: Dan Tierney.