Dominic Lawson: If more doctors are refusing to carry out abortions, it is for good moral reasons

Marc Quinn uses the human form to startle and to shock. His most famous creation is a sculpture of his head made from his own frozen blood. For some time it was a fixture in my sister's home; I never walked past it with indifference, no matter how many times I had seen it. Another of Quinn's creations is the statue of Alison Lapper in Trafalgar Square. Here, the shock is caused not by her nakedness but because Ms Lapper has one fewer arms than the man on the top of the column: none.

Yesterday this newspaper devoted a two-page spread to Marc Quinn's latest effort. The supporting article described it as a "white painted sculpture of a skeletal child with its hands raised in supplication". It is to be seen in Winchester Cathedral, "next to the tomb of a distinguished Catholic Bishop".

This is almost, but not quite, an accurate description. It is true that it appears to be a human skeleton, kneeling as if in prayer. But it is not, in the conventional sense of the word "a child". As Marc Quinn himself points out, his sculpture - called Angel - is based on a medical model of a foetus of 22 weeks' gestation.

In an interview linked to the unveiling of Angel, Quinn says: "I am not religious but for people who are, this piece is looking at some of the questions that religion seeks to answer. It asks, 'If there is a God, how can this happen? Why should one person have a rich life and be memorialised in stone, and why should another not have a life?'"

Marc Quinn does not tell us - perhaps he does not know - the full circumstances of this denial of a life. Was the original skeleton that of a miscarried pregnancy or an abortion? Perhaps the artist would say that it doesn't matter: the "baby" would have suffered the same loss of life whether his or her termination was accidental or deliberate.

Although I doubt that this was Marc Quinn's intention, Angel can be seen as a powerful, if somewhat kitsch, protest against abortion. Quite independently of that, it will probably be very popular - indeed, its wide coverage in a number of newspapers presages an unusual number of visitors to Winchester Cathedral: the leaders of modern British art are still the highest of high fashion, as demonstrated by the astonishing prices their works fetch at auction.

I am sure, however, that if the cathedral itself had created such an image, and invited the public to gawp, then there would have been a very different reaction. It would have been criticised for attempting to manipulate people's emotions against the legal right of women to have abortions. The sculpture would have been described as grossly misleading in the context of that debate, since it is self-evidently the case that a 22-week-old foetus can neither think of begging for the preservation of its life, nor deliberately form its limbs into a position of supplication.

Pretty soon, protesters would have daubed Angel with paint, perhaps spelling out the slogan of the abortion rights movement: "As early as possible, as late as necessary."

It is now 40 years since abortion was made legal in this country. To the undisguised irritation of its supporters, however, there is still a substantial minority - of women as well as men - who remain bitterly opposed to it. If anything, that minority is growing. Yesterday the GPs' magazine Pulse revealed the results of a survey of its members: a quarter refuse to refer women for terminations; more than half said that the current 24-week limit should be reduced because medical advances mean that babies born before that cut-off - which is supposed to be a measure of viability - are capable of survival.

There is also a growing awareness that consciousness - or at least some form of it - develops at an earlier stage than we once believed. Baroness Greenfield, a professor of neurology at Oxford University, argued recently that doctors - and indeed all of us - should be cautious about assuming that the unborn child lacked awareness: "Is the foetus conscious? The answer is yes, but up to a point... we should be cautious about assuming something is not conscious."

It is understandable that the law prefers to draw the line on the issue of viability, rather than consciousness. The former is - despite recent medical advances - quite clear. It remains highly unusual for babies to survive birth below the 24-week cut-off, although there are attested cases - almost as repulsive to read about as they must have been to experience for the medical staff involved - of aborted foetuses struggling to breathe, fighting to live. Consciousness, however - as Susan Greenfield indicates - is a much less definable state.

There are, in fact, many different degrees of consciousness. This has become the moral battlefield at the other end of life: it is now legal for food and drink to be withheld from people in a so-called "persistent vegetative state" - to bring about their death, no less - on the grounds that they are no longer capable of any form of thought, and never will be. The unborn child, however, is different. Even if we had reason to know that a particular foetus was not possessed of consciousness, we also know that he or she is destined to achieve full consciousness - with all the joys and miseries that it entails.

In the abortion debate, therefore, the consciousness issue is a moral red herring. So is the related issue of foetal awareness of pain. It may be true that a late-term abortion causes physical pain to the foetus; but just as American opponents of capital punishment would rightly not be appeased by the suggestion that the prisoner be injected with lethal poisons while he slept, or given a general anaesthetic before being placed in the electric chair, so the arguments over abortion should not be sidetracked by investigations into the precise state of the foetus's mind, however important the matter might be to scientists.

The results of the GPs' survey will not come as surprise to readers of The Independent. A fortnight ago this newspaper's health editor revealed that an "unprecedented number of doctors are refusing to be involved in carrying out abortions". This was criticised by Ann Furedi of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, who told The Independent that in the UK such medical procedures were regarded as "low status and unglamorous".

Kate Guthrie of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists concurred: "Who admits to friends at a dinner party that they are an abortionist? It is not a sexy area."

They are obviously right that performing abortions is not "glamorous" or "sexy". Neither is removing bunions. Yet you would not be ashamed to tell your friends that this was what you did for a living. There is a reason for that: it is not the same as stopping a beating heart.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

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