Protestors picket anti-abortion rallies

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A Pro-Life rally held at Glasgow University featuring Conservative MP Anne Widdecombe was by a counter-demonstration of around one hundred protestors on Wednesday 23 January.

The meeting was organised to discuss the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill before parliament, which critics claim will allow the mixing of humans and animals for research purposes, as well as opening the law to further extension of abortion laws.

The meeting was part of the UK-wide ‘Passion for Life’ tour, which has also encountered protests at its meetings in London, where over 400 demonstrators gathered outside Westminster Central Hall and Southampton.

A spokesperson for the group Abortion Rights, said: “The protests show the strength of feeling in support of a woman’s right to choose on abortion and against any planned attacks on women’s abortion rights in Parliament by anti-abortion MPs in the coming months – particularly on the abortion time limit.”

Current UK law allows women to have an abortion up to 24 weeks into a pregnancy. Although the current bill would not change this, anti-abortion campaigners have raised concerns that amendments to the current bill would allow an extension of the time limit. Opponents of the bill also believe that it would remove the legal necessity for male sperm donor’s names to be recorded for IVF treatments.

Ms Widdecombe defended the message of the campaign, telling the Glasgow Guardian: “We have a situation in this country where a foetus can be aborted right up to birth itself if it has a handicap such as a cleft pallet.

“At present, you can have two babies of exactly the same age and gestation and one is lying in a cot with all the resources of medical science being poured in to save it while the other is being torn from the womb and destroyed despite the fact they are at the same stage of development. That cannot be a mark of a civilised society.”

However, Christine McCafferty MP dismissed this argument.

She said: “In the 40th anniversary year of the enactment of the 1967 Abortion Act, we cannot allow the tiny minority who oppose all abortion to chip away women’s fundamental rights. Women’s rights should be extended, not restricted.

Ms Widdecombe was joined in Glasgow by Liberal Democrat Peer Lord David Alton and Nola Leach of the Christian charity CARE. The Passion for Life tours continues in Widnes on 18 February and in Cardiff on 4 March.

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