Joan Smith: A minority is trying to impose its morality on the rest of us

Whenever people start talking about abortion becoming a political issue once again, I know they're speaking in code. What it means is the religious right has spotted a chance to impose its opinions on the rest of us, first in the guise of more restrictive criteria for terminating pregnancies and then in the form of an outright ban.

They don't admit this is their agenda, of course. Calls to criminalise abortion tend to be left to cardinals, while MPs who are hostile to abortion talk about the need to tighten up the law. They make emotive speeches about late terminations, disregarding the obvious fact that most could be avoided by making abortion easier to obtain in the first three months.

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If you want horror stories, go to Poland, which now has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. Two months ago, a Polish woman won a landmark case at the European Court of Human Rights after she was denied a legal abortion even though continuing her pregnancy was likely to result in retinal haemorrhages.

In recent months, rising numbers of Polish women have been arriving in the UK seeking legal abortions after one of the most religiously conservative governments in Europe - only Malta is more hardline - outlawed it except on medical grounds and in cases of rape.

The Polish law is a huge setback for reproductive rights in a country which used to have one of the most liberal regimes in Europe, and it has emboldened the religious right elsewhere, including this country. It's part of a wider attempt to roll back the values of secularism, so much more liberal on the subject of gender, sexuality and reproductive rights than traditional Catholic countries or the conservative form of Islam.

What we need to be clear about is that the aim of the religious right is an outright ban, based on the specious claim that there is only one moral position on abortion.

There is in fact a perfectly coherent moral argument in favour of abortion - that women and girls should not be forced by the state to continue with pregnancies against their will - and the 1967 Abortion Act effectively brokered a compromise supported by most of the population.

No one in the UK is forced to have a termination against her will, and doctors who object to abortion don't have to carry them out. They don't even have to refer patients to colleagues who aren't anti-abortion, which is one of the reasons why some women have late terminations.

Hardline anti-abortionists have nothing to lose from making abortion a political issue, but it would threaten freedom of choice for millions of women who don't accept the Catholic Church's extreme view. And this is the fundamental dishonesty of their position: how can you have a political debate with anti-abortionists who don't like the present law and are set upon imposing their morality on everyone else?

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