Abortion

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

My Lords, as we are so close to the end of the debate I will not try to repeat the excellent arguments that have been made, not least by my noble friend Lady Knight in her excellent introduction. It might be well to reflect for a minute on abortion itself and the experience of abortion. I have never forgotten one young woman of 18 years of age, whose boyfriend had insisted that she have an abortion because he wanted no part of a baby, telling me what it was like. I had tears in my eyes, as she had in hers, as she told me how the whole night before her abortion she had tried to talk to her unborn baby and explain to it why it was necessary that it should die and how awful she felt when the morning came and she had to say goodbye to the baby that she would never meet. That is the reality of the personal experience of abortion.

What struck me most, looking at the excellent statistical analysis that was given to us by the Library, was that more than a third of women who appear for an abortion are on their second, third or even more. Why is it that they are not given—at the first experience of abortion at least, if not earlier in their lives—better instruction about how to prevent a pregnancy in the first place? We have failed disastrously when there are so many ways of a woman exercising birth control. When we have a morning-after pill, why is it that so many women find themselves with unwanted pregnancies? This is perhaps a failure of what is done in school but it is also—it seems to me—crucially a failure of what happens when a young woman presents herself for the first time for an abortion. She should at least be given good instruction about how to prevent it happening again. In the wider discussion of the appalling custom of aborting little girls, we should think more on the general issue of abortion itself.