eChurch Blog

Well this is surprise result on a legal case which has been rumbling along for nearly a decade.

The Department of Health has lost a court battle to keep secret some details on abortion statistics.

The government was challenging an Information Tribunal decision but data on late abortions must now be disclosed.

“Late abortions” are those carried out after 24 weeks of pregnancy. The 1967 Abortion Act made it legal to abort a foetus baby right up to birth, if there is a substantial risk of “serious” physical or mental abnormality.

Abortion on “social” grounds is only permitted prior to the 24 week deadline.

The statistics on ‘late abortions’ were originally public.

In 2003 there was an outcry over a ‘late abortion’ carried out because the baby had a cleft-palette, consequently, the Department of Health withdrew the public publication of these statistics.

The ProLife Alliance (PLA) have been campaigning for ‘transparency’ of these statistics, as they suspected some ‘late abortions’ were simply being carried our because of cosmetic abnormalities that might be easily treatable.

The Department of Health (DoH) has vigorously fought against this demand on the grounds that identification of individual patients and doctors involved in late abortions would be compromised.

There was such a breach in 2004 by journalists using public domain information to discover the identity of one of the doctors involved in a late-term abortion.

However, it must be noted that the Department of Health (DoH) had made the decision to withhold public late abortion statistics, back in 2003.

The Department of Health is considering this outcome and I suspect they may go for appeal.

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Tags: Law Moral Ethical

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 20th, 2011 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Webmaster's Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.