I lent my support to catastrophic legislation which led to abortion up to birth
By John Smeaton | 3 September 2025
Campaigners against abortion in the UK are running an advertising campaign on Facebook in support of a misleading petition, which has raised nearly 180,000 signatures calling on the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, “to do everything in his power to reduce the abortion time limit”. Drawing from my personal experience of supporting such legislation nearly forty years ago, I wish to explain why such a proposal is bad morally, bad politically, and bad for changing hearts and minds on the right to life of unborn children.
I write by way of a charitable warning to my fellow workers in the educational and political struggle against abortion in the UK. In doing so, I seek to “cast out the beam” in my own eye before presuming to advise others to take the splinter out of their own. In brief, as General Secretary (second in command) of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) in 1990, I lent my support to a catastrophic campaign in support of legislative amendments to the Abortion Act which resulted, logically and predictably, in abortion up to birth. The 1990 campaign was led in Parliament by David Alton MP and, in the country, by SPUC and by various other groups including by the Catholic bishops. (Thankfully, over the past 25 years, SPUC has opposed such campaigns).
Our joint campaign in support of upper limit legislation culminated in votes on abortion during the passage of Margaret Thatcher’s Government legislation, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, which authorised destructive research on human embryos until the 14th day after conception, against which SPUC and other groups had strenuously campaigned for many years. Following pressure from parliamentarians who supported David Alton’s Bill, the Government allowed a series of votes on abortion and Members of Parliament voted by an overwhelming majority for the upper limit for most abortions to be 24 weeks and, in the case of disability and for certain other reasons, up to the moment of birth.
The petition currently advertised on Facebook by Right to Life UK misleadingly states that “in 1990 the abortion limit was reduced from 28 weeks to 24 weeks”. This is not the case. In fact, until 1990,1 there was no 28-week upper limit as such. The Abortion Act made clear that the upper limit for abortion was governed by the Infant Life (Preservation) Act, stating:
“(5.1) Nothing in this Act shall affect the provisions of the [1929 c. 34.] Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929 (protecting the life of the viable foetus).”
And, in its turn, the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929 states:
“[A]ny person who, with intent to destroy the life of a child capable of being born alive, by any wilful act causes a child to die before it has an existence independent of its mother, shall be guilty of felony, to wit, of child destruction, and shall be liable on conviction thereof on indictment to penal servitude for life:
“Provided that no person shall be found guilty of an offence under this section unless it is proved that the act which caused the death of the child was not done in good faith for the purpose only of preserving the life of the mother.
“(2) For the purposes of this Act, evidence that a woman had at any material time been pregnant for a period of twenty-eight weeks or more shall be prima facie proof that she was at that time pregnant of a child capable of being born alive.”
Thus, the limit prior to 1990/1991 was not the definitive time of 28 weeks; rather, it was the time at which a child, in each individual case, had reached the stage of being “capable of being born alive”. 28 weeks is referenced in the legislation as providing “prima facie proof” that a child was “capable of being born alive”, but this was not the legal time limit. As was widely known at the time, many children were born before 28 weeks — even at 22 weeks’ gestation — and survived.
In 1990, therefore, parliamentarians did not vote to reduce the upper limit to 24 weeks for most abortions. They voted to raise it to 24 weeks, except in the case of disability and for certain other reasons, where abortion could be carried out up to the moment of birth — an entirely new and catastrophic provision rendering the Abortion Act even more barbaric and discriminatory than it was before. Amendments to the law made by the 1990 Act, abolished the limit contained in the 1929 Act (i.e. that a child was capable of being born alive) and a 24 week time limit was introduced but only for certain cases. A supplementary provision in the new law determined by Parliament in 1990 states, “No offence under the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929 shall be committed by a registered medical practitioner who terminates a pregnancy in accordance with the provisions of this Act.” This meant that, in certain cases, abortions could be carried out right up to the time of birth.
There is a second misleading point in Right to Life’s petition advertised on Facebook. The petition states:
“In the 30 years since [the 1990 HFE Act], medical technology has greatly improved and babies are increasingly likely to survive at earlier gestations … The latest guidance from the British Association of Perinatal Medicine enables doctors to intervene to save premature babies from 22 weeks. The latest research indicates that a significant number of babies born at 22 or 23 weeks gestation can survive outside the womb, and this number increases with proactive perinatal care.”
35 years ago, a major plank in our campaign was that “72% of liveborn infants of 22 to 27 weeks’ gestation born at Bristol Maternity Hospital survived” according to a document from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists,2 but that evidence did not stop Parliament from voting to raise the upper limit for abortion to 24 weeks in most cases, and in the case of disabled babies and for other reasons, up until birth.
The tragic outcome of the votes on abortion during the passage of the HFE Act has been a 1,400 per cent increase in abortions after 24 weeks between 1988 and 2021.3
Commenting in The Telegraph on what Parliament did in 1990, Professor John Finnis, Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Oxford, said:
“[W]hen assuring themselves that they were placing high hurdles to late abortions for handicap, many parliamentarians in the 1990 debates seemed to forget that, for an abortion to be lawful under the Abortion Act, none of the conditions in the Act’s enumerated criteria for abortion – including “substantial risk” of being “seriously handicapped” – need actually exist. It is enough that one of the conditions be thought to exist in the opinion (in “good faith”) of two doctors, even if most other doctors would consider that opinion unsound. This is one of many injustices built into the Abortion Act in 1967 and extended in 1990 to unborn babies late in pregnancy.”4
The catastrophic abortion legislation of 1990 was rooted in successive legislative campaigns by the anti-abortion lobby which were fundamentally unethical, calling on parliamentarians to vote in favour of measures, expressly permitting abortion up to a particular number of weeks for most abortions, and accepting a higher limit in the case of disabled babies. Thus, in 1975, James White MP introduced an Abortion (Amendment) Bill with an upper limit of 20 weeks for most abortions, but with a limit of 24 weeks if the child “would be born with a major disability, whether physical or mental”.5 Successive bills, similarly discriminating against disabled babies, were introduced to Parliament — in 1977 by William Benyon MP, in 1978 by Sir Bernard Braine MP, and in 1979 by John Corrie MP. All of these Bills were backed by SPUC of which I was the General Secretary from 1978, as well as by other anti-abortion groups and by the Catholic bishops.
In 1987, when David Alton MP announced at the SPUC conference that he would introduce an “18 weeks” bill, SPUC’s position was set out by Director, Phyllis Bowman, in the Catholic newspaper, The Universe:
“Our greatest fears with this kind of Bill have always been it would undermine the 1929 Infant Life Preservation Act – which protects all babies capable of being born alive – and that it would end up a weak Bill, with a ban at, say 24 weeks, or exemptions for babies with handicaps. However, Mr Alton has assured us that his Bill will not undermine the 1929 Act; he stands firm on 18 weeks and no exemptions, and has said that if the Bill was to become weakened through a number of amendments he would rather give it up altogether.”6
Sadly, when his Bill was published in December 1987, David Alton’s assurances were not vindicated. As Dr Colin Harte writes:
“Of the five exceptions to the 18-week limit, three referred to the mother’s state of health and two to the condition of the unborn child, the clause relevant to the child’s condition specifically allowing abortion later than the proposed limit “if … [1] the child is likely to be born dead or [2] with physical abnormalities so serious that its life cannot be independently sustained”. In a statement accompanying publication of the bill, Alton said that under this clause abortion would be allowed for children with anencephaly, Potter’s disease, and Edward’s syndrome.”7
SPUC’s support, and the support of other groups, remained undiminished. A decade later, in 1998, in an interview with Dr Harte, I personally defended SPUC’s position on the basis that we were trying to save as many lives as we can. Attempting to save lives, I said, was a “first consideration” and was “ordinary common sense”. And, in a letter to Dr Harte on 15 April 1998, David Alton spelled out the thinking which prevailed across the anti-abortion movement at that time in these words:
“I am, myself, an ‘absolutist’ but the ethical rationale for the Bill supported by the Catholic hierarchy and others, was that any measure which saved a single life, reduced the total number of abortions, and re-opened the [abortion] debate, was entirely acceptable from an ethical point of view.”8
Parliamentary filibustering prevented a vote on the David Alton Abortion Amendment Bill and it made no further progress. However, SPUC had orchestrated a huge nationwide campaign with David Alton in support of legislative proposals, which expressly permitted abortions to be carried out up to so many weeks, but, in the case of disabled babies, and in other cases, abortions could be carried out several weeks later. We had firmly established in the public mind the appalling principle that it was acceptable to trade certain, less favoured — for example disabled — unborn lives, in the hope of saving more lives overall.
Since David Alton and his anti-abortion colleagues in Parliament, SPUC and other pro-life groups, as well as the Catholic bishops, were prepared to back legislative amendments which expressly permitted abortion up to certain gestation, with exceptions made for disabled babies, it’s hardly surprising that the Government, led by the pro-abortion Margaret Thatcher, should do the same thing, albeit raising the limit for most abortions to 24 weeks, and extending the killing of disabled babies up until birth, rather than 28 weeks as proposed in the Alton Bill.
The anti-abortion lobby — me included — had set an appalling example and the Government and MPs, predictably, followed that example. Ever since then, the scourge of upper limit legislation has dominated the thinking of the anti-abortion lobby in Parliament.
It remains for me to explain why another upper limit bill, backed by Right to Life’s petition on Facebook — and just last year, backed by the Catholic bishops of England and Wales — will prove as catastrophic as the upper limit legislation passed in 1990, why such legislation is bad for changing hearts and minds on the right to life of unborn children, and why such legislative proposals fail to conform to Catholic teaching that it is licit to support proposals aimed at limiting the harm of existing abortion legislation.
Notes
- Or rather until 1 April 1991 when the abortion amendments in the Human Fertilisation and Embyrology Act came into force. ↩︎
- See page 295 of Beard, R. W., and Sharp, F. (1985). Preterm Labour and Its Consequences. London: Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. ↩︎
- In 1998 there were 22 abortions after 24 weeks. In 2021, there were 274 abortions after 24 weeks.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/abortion-statistics-for-england-and-wales-2021/abortion-statistics-england-and-wales-2021
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1990-03-06/debates/8576cd7a-e507-41fb-8d2a-bde89e4e2d34/Abortions#:~:text=the%20last%20year.-,Mr.,months%20of%201989%20is%2017. ↩︎ - John Finnis, “We warned them, they mocked us, now we’ve been proved right“, The Telegraph, 7th December 2003. ↩︎
- Abortion (Amendment) Bill 1975, clause 7(b). ↩︎
- Sandra Pajak, “SPUC, LIFE, Back Alton Abortion Bill”, The Universe, 2nd October 1987. ↩︎
- Changing Unjust Laws Justly, CUA Press, 2005, page 29. ↩︎
- Colin Harte, Changing Unjust Laws Justly (CUA Press, 2005) p 2, footnote 7. ↩︎