Misguided campaigning undermines the right to life and empowers the pro-abortion lobby
By John Smeaton | 17 September 2025
I explained in my first two articles how I share responsibility for catastrophic legislation permitting abortion up to birth, passed by the UK Parliament in 1990 as a tragic consequence of the pro-life lobby’s moral compromise in the 1970s and 80s. It remains for me to show how abortion time limit legislation undermined the case against abortion and empowered the pro-abortion majority in Parliament.
In my earlier articles, I detailed how Right to Life UK, with its current Facebook campaign, is now set to make the same mistake that the pro-life lobby made 35 years ago, in concert with the Catholic bishops, and various anti-abortion groups, including the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC)1 of which I was General Secretary at the time. I also showed that Right to Life’s claim that the 1990 legislation lowered the upper limit for abortion to 24 weeks is mistaken; the upper limit for most abortions, was raised to 24 weeks and, in the case of disabled babies and for other reasons, up to birth. As well as being a spectacular failure politically, upper limit legislation subverted the case against abortion in the mind of the public.
The exception for disabled babies, pioneered by the anti-abortion lobby in the 1970s and 80s, resulted in our putting forward appalling arguments which undermined the inviolability of human life in public opinion.
In support of his 1987 Abortion (Amendment) Bill, David Alton MP argued that it was acceptable to kill children before birth whose lives were expected to be very short, Potter Syndrome babies and anencephalic babies, thus undermining the right to life of babies with any other kind of disability whose lives may be deemed by the pro-abortion lobby to lack value for some other heartbreaking reason. David Alton said:
“Disability should not be confused with diseases like Potter[’s] Syndrome or Anencephaly where the child does not have the organs to sustain life. My Bill will obviously allow for terminations in such cases and in order to save the life of the mother or child. But there is a world of difference between Anencephaly and, for instance, muscular dystrophy”.2
Potter Syndrome is a rare condition that affects the growth and function of a baby’s kidneys and other internal organs. There are several causes for this condition, but symptoms arise because of too little amniotic fluid in the uterus. This condition is life-threatening for the baby and many infants have a short life expectancy.
Anencephaly occurs when the fetal brain and skull don’t develop in as expected. Babies born with the condition [usually] die within a few hours or days. Most pregnancies end in miscarriage. Mothers can lower your risk by taking the recommended dose of folic acid before and during pregnancy. There is one case report of an anencephalic baby who lived for 28 months.
Similarly appalling is the following extract from SPUC’s booklet supporting David Alton’s Bill, published in 1987/88, entitled Facts on the Abortion (Amendment) Bill:
“In 1986 of 8,276 abortions after 18 weeks, 648 (only 7.8%) were performed because the child was likely to be born handicapped. Regardless of whether one believes in abortion for the handicapped or not, the fact is that the new technique of Chorion Biopsy means that any handicap formerly detected by amniocentesis late in pregnancy can now be detected at 9–10 weeks thus eliminating the need for late abortions in those circumstances.”
Looking back nearly 40 years later, this terrible line of argument illustrates with startling clarity a major reason why it is wrong to campaign for legislation allowing abortion up to a certain number of weeks’ gestation: because such campaigns, just as they involve parliamentarians in voting in favour of killing babies up to a certain age, they also send an unambiguous message to the public that it’s acceptable to kill babies up until that point, even if this is not the pro-life campaigners’ intention.
Finally, the catastrophic 1990 abortion legislation was the result of a huge miscalculation on the part of the anti-abortion lobby. The Second Reading of David Alton’s Abortion Amendment Bill on 22 January 1988, which sought to set an upper limit of 18 weeks for most abortions, with abortions up to 28 weeks for disability and for other reasons, received a majority of 296 votes to 251. However, David Alton’s Bill lacked the Government’s backing and was “talked out” by opponents and so ran out of parliamentary time.
However, emboldened by the majority at theSecond Reading, Members of Parliament, led by Sir Bernard Braine and Ann Winterton, chairman and vice-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group, put pressure on the Government to include a vote on abortion in the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology legislation.
According to Government documents in the National Archives, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, at a meeting of senior government officials on 20 November 1990:
“There was clearly an understanding among pro-life Government backbenchers that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [which resulted in the authorization of destructive research on human embryos until the 14th day after conception] would allow such [abortion] amendments to be discussed. If the House authorities were now to rule that the Bill did not permit such amendments they would feel that the Government had acted in bad faith.”
Margaret Thatcher was basing her statement on a memorandum from Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Deputy Prime Minister, Leader of the House and Lord President of the Council, in which he told her:
“The leaders of the pro-life lobby expect that there will be an opportunity to debate and decide the abortion issue in the context of the [Human Fertilisation and Embryology] Bill. No public commitments have been given to this effect. But David Waddington [the Chief Whip from 1987 until 1989, when he became Home Secretary] is clear that Bernard Braine and Ann Winterton were told that it would be impossible to draft the long title of the Bill in such a way as to exclude abortion amendments. If this turns out not to be the case, they will accuse us of bad faith.”
The pressure brought to bear by the pro-life lobby backfired spectacularly. On 24 April, 1990, Members of Parliament voted to raise the upper limit for abortion to 24 weeks (not to lower it) by 411 votes to 154 and they voted for abortion up to birth by 308 votes to 149.
The pro-life lobby, both inside and outside Parliament, had failed to take into account the influence of the pro-abortion Margaret Thatcher,3 a powerful Conservative prime minister, on Conservative MPs, many of whom joined the overwhelming majority of Labour MPs supporting abortion.
The anti-abortion lobby had also failed to take into account that more than 100 Members of Parliament had failed to vote either way when David Alton’s Bill won a majority of 45 votes at its Second Reading.
That was 35 years ago. In today’s Parliament, in which Right to Life is unwisely calling on Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a strongly pro-abortion politician, to back upper limit abortion legislation, MPs voted only three months ago to expand the UK’s horrific abortion laws by 379 votes to 137, so that no criminal offence is committed by a woman who induces her own abortion at any stage in pregnancy “including just before natural birth”. We can be certain that any legislation to lower the upper limit for abortion would only be supported if it were accompanied by further exceptions including amendments to the criminal law, ensuring even greater availability of abortion than exists at present.
I urge Right to Life to learn from history, including disastrous errors to which I personally was party, read the signs of the times and, finally, to drop their campaign for Keir Starmer to lower the upper limit abortion legislation. It will only end in tears and the killing of countless more unborn children.
Notes
- Thankfully, SPUC reversed its position on upper limit legislation 10 years later. ↩︎
- Press release by David Alton MP, Sept – Oct 1987, cited in Colin Harte, Changing Unjust Laws Justly (CUA Press, 2005) p 30. ↩︎
- Margaret Thatcher voted in support of the Abortion Act 1967 which made abortion available virtually on demand. ↩︎