The matter of life and death

Mike Leigh's controversial Vera Drake has just won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival; Kitty Kelley's new book on the Bush dynasty is posing uncomfortable questions for the US President. And in Britain, Tony Blair is under pressure to reform the abortion laws. Virginia Ironside takes a very personal look at an issue that still divides us like no other

My heart sank when I read that abortion appeared to be the theme of the Venice Film Festival this year. I imagined a parade of dancing foetuses, huge-eyed blobs with tiny fingers and tiny toes, all tugging away at our heartstrings.

My heart sank when I read that abortion appeared to be the theme of the Venice Film Festival this year. I imagined a parade of dancing foetuses, huge-eyed blobs with tiny fingers and tiny toes, all tugging away at our heartstrings.

But it turns out that the two films that have captured the headlines are, according to the people who've seen them, both pro-choice - the euphemistic phrase that means "pro-abortion". Mike Leigh's Vera Drake, which won the Golden Lion prize for best film, tells how easy it was for a rich girl to get an abortion in the Fifties, compared with how dangerous and dirty it was when performed by the well-meaning housewife Vera, an archetypal back-street abortionist. And Todd Solondz's Palindromes tells of a 12-year-old girl who becomes pregnant and whose mother wants her to have an abortion. But the child runs away and ends up being looked after by a woman with a home for handicapped children, who is so opposed to abortion that she is prepared to kill to achieve her ends.

These films are timely, because the climate at the moment is becoming dangerously anti-abortion. Recently, Professor Stuart Campbell's pictures of 4D ultrasound "dancing foetuses", showing that 12-week-old foetuses move in the womb and have facial expressions, grabbed the headlines of the red-top newspapers, many of which predicted that the discovery would prompt Private Members' Bills to reduce the upper age limit of abortion, now 24 weeks. Even Lord David Steel, father of the 1967 Abortion Act, expressed concern. The fact that these photos have been around for years was conveniently forgotten.

Rumours are rife that the Government, which has said that next year it will re-examine the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act with regard to fertility and infertility, may take the opportunity to look again at the upper time limit for abortion, and reassess the abortion laws generally. A government in the hands of an evangelical Christian like Tony Blair is almost bound to consider putting curbs on abortion laws as they stand.

Abortion is already a hot topic in the election campaign in the United States. One of George Bush's first actions as president was to reintroduce the Mexico City Policy. This old Reagan policy, introduced in 1984 and rescinded in 1993, prohibits overseas agencies that use any part of their private contributions to fund any aspect of abortion - even if it is only information-giving - from receiving US funding.

But skeletons in Bush's own cupboard are currently being rattled by Kitty Kelley who, in her new book, delves into allegations that he arranged for a pregnant girlfriend to have an abortion when he was younger. Four friends of this woman provided affidavits about it to magazines Time and Newsweek, though these publications didn't follow up the allegation at the time.

Over here, meanwhile, the anti-abortion atmosphere is palpable. Heads are shaken over the founder of Women on Waves, Rebecca Gomperts, whose so-called "abortion ship" is anchored off the Portuguese coast. She recently discovered that a drug prescribed for gastric ulcers, which also induces abortion, is available at a Lisbon chemist's, and says that she will post a scientific manual for safely inducing abortion, using medicine widely available in many countries, on her website.

And despite the fact that the vast majority of women who have abortions walk away from the experience breathing a sigh of relief and get on with their lives, there is now a commonly held belief that abortion is a traumatic experience.

Moreover, headlines were made earlier this year when an Anglican vicar won a case against the police whom she had taken to court because they failed to take action against a woman who'd had a late abortion, reportedly because her baby was suffering from a cleft palate. The Rev Joanna Jepson claimed that a cleft palate is not a serious disability, and that the doctors who performed the abortion had therefore broken the law on late terminations.

Having had so many abortions myself, any prospect of a curb makes me shudder. I had the last one under the terms of the latest laws, in the late Seventies, and it was private, quick and efficient. The one before, on the National Health in the early Seventies, involved a long and upsetting wait of weeks, and recovering in, of all places, a maternity ward. But the first, an illegal abortion in the bad old Sixties, was an exceptionally unpleasant affair. I had to take £100 in "used oncers" - that was the expression actually used - to a grubby basement in Harley Street where an unpleasant little doctor grilled me until I cried.

When I returned the following day I was shown the room where I would be operated on. In it was a table with a couple of stirrups, into which I would put my legs. On the floor was a large bucket, full of blood - presumably old foetuses - and the operation was performed by a man who appeared to be wearing blood-stained gumboots. It was dirty, unkind and deeply unpleasant, and it was only because I was so desperate that I went through with it at all.

But what are today's facts and figures? The latest statistics available show that, in 2003, 181,582 abortions took place in England and Wales. Abortion rates were highest among women under 24 - about 30 abortions per 1,000 pregnancies fell within this age group. The majority of abortions were performed within the first 13 weeks of pregnancy. Only 2 per cent of terminations occurred at 20 weeks or later.

Ann Furedi, the chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, which performs 87 per cent of all abortions over 20 weeks (about 2,500 a year), says: "There seems to be an assumption among a lot of commentators that science has developed since the time limit was altered in 1990 so the law needs to be brought in line with current developments, but this is misguided. People talk about how you can keep very tiny babies alive, but even if an antenatal unit tries to keep a baby alive at 22 weeks, there's only a 1 per cent chance of it surviving."

Of course, it is true that our comparatively civilised abortion laws could do with re-examining, but lowering the upper limit is not the answer. Making abortions easier would help - because then fewer later abortions would need to be performed. But the upper limit has to be kept for a few agonising situations that some women find themselves in. These fall into roughly six categories.

The majority of the women who require late abortions are teenagers. When they suspect they're pregnant, some stick their head in the sand hoping the whole thing will go away. They may simply be panicked, like rabbits in headlights, unable to make a decision, trying to put off facing up to the problem until crucial weeks have passed.

Or their periods might not yet have stabilised into a regular pattern, so they're not sure whether they've missed a period or not until it's too late for simple medical or surgical intervention.

At the other end of the spectrum are those women who believe, when their periods stop, that they're simply beginning the menopause.

Other women again have been injected with the contraceptive drug Depo-Provera, which also stops their periods. If there is some slip in the effectiveness of the drug - which is extremely rare - it's almost impossible to spot until far too much time has gone by for a simple abortion.

Or there are women who have been to their doctors and found that, because of religious principles, these medics not only refuse to refer them for treatment, but also refuse to refer them on to a doctor who will be sympathetic. This is illegal, but it does happen, and by the time everything is sorted out, it's often very late for an abortion.

Then there are the women to whom fate has delivered some frightful blow in the middle of the pregnancy. They might suddenly be let down by their partners and realise that they're financially and emotionally unable to cope on their own. Or life circumstances might have occurred that mean there is no way they could bring up a child.

Jan Barlow, the chief executive of Brook Advisory Centres, adds another category - those young people who have gone to doctors who refuse to refer them for an abortion unless they consult their parents. "This is not legal, in fact. Doctors are obliged to refer on, in all cases, whatever their principles are. But it does often happen that they don't, delaying everything even further and reducing [the girl's] options."

Furedi agrees: "Every single woman who has a late abortion gets to this late stage because of their own incredibly complicated and painful circumstances."

Earlier this year, an emotional programme about abortion was made by a girl who had had one and wanted everyone to see what exactly went on. True, the sight of an early abortion - a small tablespoonful of blood and mucus on a petri dish - was surprisingly humdrum. But then the programme featured the usual emotional pictures of foetuses aborted at 24 weeks, looking like tiny monkeys, dead and dismembered on petri dishes. There was a prurience that informed the programme, all designed to make you feel guilt. "See the tiny fingers!" it seemed to be saying. "Cry at the sweet little heartbeat! Compare yourself to Hitler! Count the itsy little toes! Weep buckets at its funny little expression!" For a moment even I, old abortion veteran that I am, felt slightly queasy.

But slightly queasy was all. Frank and fearless as the documentary was, and achingly explicit, my gripe was that it didn't go nearly far enough. What this documentary didn't dare to show was something far, far worse than any picture of an aborted foetus - and that was pictures of unwanted live babies.

Millions of babies are born who suffer for whole lifetimes simply because they are unwanted. In Europe alone it's estimated that more than a million unwanted and abandoned children are suffering in the most inhuman conditions in orphanages that defy description. Nearly two children a week in this country are killed by a member of their family or someone in a position of care. There is nothing special about "life" per se. A life without love of any kind is a living hell. Recently, I was talking to a head teacher who told me that the mothers of two different pupils had come to the school with a pile of suitcases and, dumping them on the floor, had announced: "I hate my child. I don't want her. I never want to see her again. Goodbye."

Suffering that kind of rejection makes the picture of an aborted foetus pale, in my books, into insignificance, "sweet" little fingers and toes notwithstanding.

Perhaps it is the unpalatable fact of unwanted children - a subject which is far more taboo than abortion - that Leigh should address in his next film.