6 October 2012

Jeremy Hunt has no evidence for his abortion stance

Health Secretary says 24-week limit should be halved to 12 weeks. But where's his evidence?

Jeremy Hunt appears intent on proving as controversial in his new job as he did in his old one. In his first newspaper interview since becoming Health Secretary, Hunt declares his support for halving the legal time limit for women to have abortions, from 24 weeks to 12. He tells the Times (£):

I’m not someone who thinks that abortion should be made illegal. Everyone looks at the evidence and comes to a view about when that moment is and my own view is that 12 weeks is the right point for it.

It’s just my view about that incredibly difficult question about the moment that we should deem life to start. I don’t think the reason I have that view is for religious reasons.

Hunt voted in favour of a 12-week limit in 2008, so this isn’t the first time he’s expressed his views on the subject, but his promotion to Health Secretary means they have taken on a new significance. Downing Street has emphasised that Hunt was expressing a personal view and that it has no plans to change the current law, something that would require a free vote by MPs. But at the very least, Hunt’s status as Health Secretary affords him a powerful platform to argue for a lower limit and, upsetting the Tories’ pre-conference preparations, he has chosen to do so.

In response, health professionals have warned that a 12-week limit would effectively end testing for conditions such as Down’s syndrome and force women into having terminations before they are ready. Just eight per cent of abortions currently take place after 12 weeks. Kate Guthrie, spokeswoman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, told the Times:

If everybody had to have abortions by 12 weeks, my worry would be that women would be rushed into making decisions: ‘I have to have an abortion now or I can’t have one.’ That’s an absolute shocker. You will absolutely create mental health problems if you start dragooning women into making decisions before they have to.

The paper’s columnist Alice Thomson points out (£):

The vast majority of those whose abortions take place after 12 weeks have a good reason for the delay and are the most complicated cases. It’s the women who have abortions before 12 weeks who tend to be more likely to be using abortion as a lazy contraception. The cases after 12 weeks tend to be young girls who didn’t realise they were pregnant or suspected that they were but were too afraid to discuss it, or women in their late 40s who believed they were menopausal and are worried about the risks of late motherhood.

One searches in vain for any consideration of these points by Hunt or any “evidence” in favour of a 12-week limit. The Health Secretary is entitled to his views – would we rather he concealed them? – but he will be judged accordingly.