Abortion Problems in Britain

Since britain’s abortion act Came into operation four years ago there has been growing uneasiness about its results. Last year’s total of 126,774 abortions shows a 57 per cent increase over that of 1970. One of the biggest category increases came among girls under sixteen.

During the past month three newspaper items have caught my eye—none considered sensational enough to make the front page. I summarize and give them without comment. (1) The pregnancy advisory service in Birmingham (Britain’s second largest city) plans to run on alternate days a coach service to its nursing home on the south coast for women who are to have abortions. The organization claims to offer a “door-to-door service.” (2) Roman Catholic gynecologists seeking senior hospital posts are said to have been rejected by selection boards because of their religious views. Some have been advised to change their specialty or emigrate if they want to advance. (3) Some Christian nurses object to taking part in abortion and wish to “contract out.” A larger number find the work “distasteful.” A nursing sister writes that in many cases abortion produces a fetus of considerable maturity that is then kept in a refrigerator to await collection for research purposes (“a sickening sight … confronting you each time you needed to open the door”). A committee is currently investigating this angle.

At last there has appeared a comprehensive study from a Christian doctor who seeks to tackle the subject in all its complexity: Abortion: The Personal Dilemma (Paternoster, Eerdmans). The author, R. F. R. Gardner, had previously contributed to CHRISTIANITY TODAY (May 22, 1970) an essay on “Christian Choices in a Liberal Abortion Climate.” Graduate of Edinburgh’s famed medical school, with experience as a medical missionary and in government service in Africa, Rex Gardner is an ordained Presbyterian minister who now serves as consultant obstetrician and gynecologist in a northern England group of hospitals. His 288-page volume is not a theological treatise; even less is it a clinical textbook. Here are words born out of real, poignant situations in which medical skill and pastoral heart combine to wrestle with agonizing case histories.

Gardner stresses the distinction between abortion and cessation of pregnancy. The gynecologist thinks not just of the latter but of the former:

Of the act. It is a lonely operation. Although dilation of the cervix, the neck of the womb, is an operation he performs many times a week, on this occasion it will be different. He takes that first dilator and is tinglingly aware that he is about to seal the fate of a fetus, that he is about to alter history. In other operations the cervix will dilate up readily, but in this operation it will fight, grip the end of the dilator and force it back into his hand. And then at last he will win, and as he does he will wonder who has lost.

Illustration is given of irreconcilable differences among doctors, with one eminent authority suggesting that the Abortion Act contributes toward raising the quality of human life, another not unsympathetic admitting that “therapeutic abortion … is associated to some extent with human denigration,” and a third cautioning that “it is only a short step from disposable babies to disposable people.”

The Abortion Act permits termination of a pregnancy if its continuance “would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, or of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated.” The words I have italicized invite widely different interpretations, and this is a bedeviling feature of the Act. In their eagerness to get the bill through parliament the sponsors evidently did not seek or did not listen to professional advice, and this is reflected in wording so loose that the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said, “It is quite clear that what this Act really means largely depends upon what you want it to mean.” This, comments Gardner, might lead on to the argument of a psychiatrist: “Even our own figures in this country … suggest that it is at least twice as dangerous to have a perfectly normal pregnancy as it is to have what I might call a perfectly normal abortion.”

Gardner notes that the Act includes a “Conscience Clause” under which medical staff can opt out of any treatment to which they have a conscientious objection, except for treatment necessary to save the life of, or prevent grave injury to, the pregnant woman. The book then deals at some length with the new difficulties the Act has raised for the medical profession—a section that should cause some humbling reaction among the laity.

In discussing the inevitability of Christian involvement, Gardner sees four strands in the Church’s mission: the worth of the individual for whom Christ died; the recognition that helping people involves the whole of their situation; the duty to press for social righteousness; and the biblical warning that the God who demands righteousness will return.

From the prohibition by the early and medieval Church, Gardner goes on to detail how abortion is now regarded by each of Britain’s major denominations. And he questions whether theological conservatives deserve the oft-heard accusation of a hard and negative attitude far from the compassion of Christ.

Other chapters deal with Old and New Testament guidance; the spiritual status of the fetus; and the role of the Christian, whether he be doctor, patient, or advisor. The Christian doctor, Gardner concludes, has no slick answer; he must weigh all the factors of each case, remembering that the Christian is called to do God’s will, to be compassionate.

The remainder of the book offers data toward making such a judgment. These include numerous case histories (some of them almost unbearably moving) concerned with the diseased mother, socio-economic factors, illegitimate pregnancy, the pregnant student, the malformed fetus, the mental, physical, and spiritual results of abortion—and the future when abortion is refused.

Conscious as I am of the inadequacy and superficiality of these introductory comments, I warmly commend the book to readers of this journal. Perhaps its subject is one on which we cannot feel profoundly so long as we regard it merely as an intellectual or even an ethical exercise. One harrowing experience where someone known to us is concerned would bring us to the heart of the matter.

But so too will this book. It may get a frigid reception from cozy suburbanity where jolting new dimensions are unappreciated, but with courage and candor and knowledge Rex Gardner has told us what we ought to hear, and shown how in this unlikely area lie whole new challenges and opportunities for Christian mission.

J. D. DOUGLAS

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