BPAS: Scottish Cardinal O'Brien's comments on abortion

Thursday, 31, May 2007 12:00

Ann Furedi, Chief Executive of BPAS, the UK’s leading sexual healthcare charity which also provides abortion care for 55,000 women each year, said today:

‘Abortion is a safe, legal and medically legitimate procedure, essential in safeguarding women’s reproductive health. Women should be able to make their own choices about their bodies and their future.

‘At BPAS, we offer a non-judgemental service. We see many couples and women for contraception and abortion treatment who are active Catholics. It is quite clear that not everyone sharing the Catholic faith with the Cardinal agrees with him on this issue.

‘Religious dignitaries clearly speak from a deep personal moral opposition to abortion when making speeches such as today’s, which seeks to lobby Holyrood and Westminster, doctors, medical schools and Catholic voters.

‘The Cardinal has every right to hold his views. He obviously doesn’t have to have an abortion, or provide one.’

BPAS, (formerly known as the British Pregnancy Advisory Service) a registered charity since 1968, and is the UK’s leading not-for-profit sexual healthcare provider. BPAS carried out 55,000 terminations of pregnancy last year. 85% per cent of all treatments carried out by BPAS were on behalf of the NHS. Please see www.bpas.org for further information.

The Abortion Act requires that two doctors must agree that the risk to a woman’s physical or mental health, or the risk to her children’s physical or mental health will be greater, if she continues with the pregnancy than if she ends it. This applies up until 24 weeks’ gestation. This Act does not apply in Northern Ireland.

Having an abortion poses fewer medical risks than going through pregnancy and birth for most women. See the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ (RCOG) website for more details.

The RCOG also state that ‘At least one-third of British women will have had an abortion by the time they reach the age of 45’ (see p1, ‘Care of women requesting induced abortion’, Evidence-based Guideline Number 7, Sept 2004).

Doctors agree that where safe, legal abortion is not available, women’s lives are at risk. Worldwide 68,000 women die each year after unsafe abortion, according to the World Health Organisation. Many thousands of others are left with severe long-term health problems as a consequence.