The woman's decision
I suggest that the decision to have an abortion can only properly be made by the pregnant woman herself. Although an individual doctor may have a conscientious objection to abortion, which must be respected, it is difficult to imagine circumstances in which a doctor's clinical judgement could justify refusing a woman's request for abortion. In short, because an abortion always poses a smaller risk to a woman's health than carrying a pregnancy to term and going through childbirth, compelling a woman to carry her unwanted pregnancy to term could not be justified on health grounds.

	Thinking Point
	How do you think the current abortion legislation in your country affects women's freedom to enter into non-reproductive sexual relationships?

Moreover, given imperfect contraception, and human beings' inability to exercise complete control over their reproductive capacity, unwanted pregnancies are an inevitable side-effect of sexual freedom, and the safety net of legal abortion is an essential adjunct of effective birth control. Without liberal access to abortion, women's freedom to enter into non-reproductive sexual relationships might be jeopardised by the threat of unwanted procreation. Choosing to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth to a child is undoubtedly one of the most significant decisions a woman will ever take, and it is not, in my opinion, one that anyone else should be able to either veto, or force upon her. Abortion law should--I argue--no longer consist in a set of defences to the criminal offence of "procuring a miscarriage" abortion, but rather should, like the rest of British medical law, be informed by the guiding principle of patient self-determination.

Abortion and the law: Emily Jackson discusses the laws and regulations governing abortion in the UK and the US and the impact this has on the political and social landscape. (7:25 min)

Unwanted pregnancies and attempts to terminate them have always existed. When safe, legal abortion is unavailable, women have unsafe, illegal abortions or they travel to places with more liberal abortion laws. Approximately a quarter of the world's population live in countries where abortion is either illegal or only permitted if the pregnant woman's life is in danger. In these countries, around 20 million women have illegal abortions each year, resulting in nearly 80,000 deaths. It is impossible to calculate exactly how many women travel abroad to terminate their unwanted pregnancies. Each year, for example, 2,000 women at English abortion clinics give addresses in Northern Ireland and nearly 6,000 women give addresses in the Republic of Ireland. Undoubtedly the real figures are much higher

utine and frequently performed operation. It is the most common surgical operation for women of reproductive age, and it has been estimated that between 35-40 percent of all women will have at least one abortion during their lives.. The vast majority of abortions take place within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy when it is an extremely simple procedure. Yet despite being a straightforward operation, abortion is subject to a distinctive and extraordinary legal framework. Its legalisation in 1967 simply created a series of defences to the criminal offences contained in the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 and the Infant Life Preservation Act of 1929.

Abortion is also a particularly controversial and embattled ethical issue. In the United States disagreements over abortion have determined nominations to the Supreme Court and decided election results. In several countries abortion providers have been subjected to violence, arson and murder Negotiations over abortion legislation were said to create more difficulties than any other single issue in the reunification of Germany. Although abortion may not inspire quite such fierce controversy in Britain, it remains a highly sensitive and emotionally charged subject. Since 1967 there have been over 20 parliamentary attempts to restrict access to abortion, and there have been several, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, applications to the courts for injunctions to prohibit terminations.

There are two principal reasons for abortion's enduring contentiousness. First, some people think that abortion is incompatible with respect for the moral value of the fetus. This view is held with varying degrees of intensity. There are those who believe that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception, and that abortion is therefore always equivalent to murder, while others consider that fetal life should be protected unless a compelling justification for abortion exists. Very few people hold the former point of view, although a Zogby International "American Values" poll shoed that the majority of Americans believe abortion is manslaughter. There would, for example, be little public support for charging a teenage rape victim, who had terminated the resulting pregnancy, with murder. The belief that abortion law should offer the fetus some protection, while falling short of endowing it with full legal personhood, is held far more widely, and forms the basis of the Abortion Act of 1967.

Contraception and abortion
Many people believe that there is a fundamental moral difference between preventing conception and ending an unwanted pregnancy, and UK law subjects contraception and abortion to entirely different regulatory regimes. But this bright line boundary between contraception and abortion may be unsustainable as new techniques make it increasingly difficult to tell whether a pregnancy is being prevented or terminated.

	The Morning After Pill
	The morning after pill is the most common type of emergency contraception. It has become widely used since being made available over the counter in Britain in 2001. It is a high dosage of the birth control pill and works by inhibiting ovulation. It is a controversial issue with some organisations claiming that it acts as a form of chemical abortion.

Postcoital contraception, such as the 'morning-after' pill, works by preventing the implantation of a fertilised egg. Is a woman pregnant as soon as fertilisation occurs, or is pregnancy only achieved several days later once the fertilised egg has successfully implanted in her uterus? The Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 defines abortion as "procuring a miscarriage", so our definition of miscarriage' might be relevant in determining whether an abortion has taken place. In its ordinary linguistic sense, miscarriage must be the antonym of 'carriage', a word that seems to imply that the fertilised egg must have attached itself to the pregnant woman's body. Although the legislation itself is silent on the meaning of miscarriage, in 2002 the High Court decided that a woman can only be considered pregnant after the blastocyst (a very early embryo) has implanted in her uterus. The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child had challenged the decision to allow the 'morning after' pill to be sold without prescription in pharmacies, claiming that the pill was in fact an abortifacient and so offences were being committed under the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861. This was rejected by Munby J, who found that there could be no miscarriage, and hence no criminal offence, until the blastocyst had attached itself to the wall of the uterus.

Are some abortions morally 'worse' than others?
It is extremely unlikely that abortion would ever be completely recriminalised in the UK, and it is clear that many anti-abortion lobbyists have implicitly accepted that a blanket prohibition upon abortion is not a realistic or achievable goal. In recent years anti-abortion lobbyists have tended to focus their attention upon certain sorts of abortion that are perceived to be more morally problematic than normal. For example, their criticism of fetal reduction (the selective termination of one or more fetuses during a multiple pregnancy), is one reason why anti-abortion campaigners have been vociferous critics of reproductive technologies.

Selective abortion: Emily Jackson discusses the practice of selective abortion and the arguments for and against it. She explains that the practice is extremely rare and outlines some reasons for selective termination. (2:35 min)

In recent years the acknowledgement that discrimination against disabled people is as illegitimate as discrimination on grounds of sex or race appears to have been accompanied by increased anxiety about the routine abortion of abnormal fetuses. A parallel is commonly drawn between abortion on the grounds of abnormality and the discreditable history of eugenics. Evoking the chilling barbarism of Nazism in order to criticise prenatal testing is an extremely powerful rhetorical device, for, as Jonathan Glover has pointed out, "if a policy can be described as eugenic, that is enough for most people to rule it out at once". Unlike the twentieth century's public eugenic sterilisation programmes, prenatal screening is criticised for normalising private eugenic decision-making. Ulrich Beck, for example, has said that "the eugenics that threatens has shed all the distinguishing marks of a sinister conspiracy, and donned the robes of health, productivity and profit".