Nadine Dorries: "Making access to abortion easier should not be a priority. We do not want to see the numbers go up. What is it that we would be asking nurses to do? My American intern, Stephanie, telephoned a British Pregnancy Advisory Service clinic and said that she was 18 weeks pregnant and a student alone in the UK. She said that she had been to see a GP who had told her that she was 17 weeks pregnant and she needed a termination, and asked what she could do. She said that she did not want to have an anaesthetic or go into hospital. The clinic said, “No problem. Come along to the clinic, we will give you medication and you can go home and abort there.” They told a student, who they thought would be on her own, with a pregnancy of 17 weeks gestation to go home and experience pain like she would never have known before, to bleed in a way that she would never have imagined possible, and then to abort her own baby and dispose of it. At that stage of gestation, the baby would be entirely recognisable. That is what is taking place today in the UK—and the amendments that I have described would make abortion even more easily accessible.
The BPAS, and the other providers carrying out abortions on behalf of the Government, do so for around £700 a time. There are some 200,000 abortions a year, and some people have a very serious interest in ensuring that we do not restrict the number of terminations, and even that they increase. I call that almost an abuse of women’s rights. When a woman goes to a doctor to request an abortion, she is in crisis. Every woman who presents at a GP’s surgery requesting an abortion should be counselled and told what the alternatives are. She has a right to know her options and the consequences of abortion, but that does not happen. I want amendments tabled to the Bill that would give a woman the right to know what abortion entails and what she would go through.
I hope that hon. Members, when they seek to inform themselves about abortion, will not go to the Science and Technology Committee report, the RCOG committee or the BMA, because too many people in those organisations have too great a financial vested interest in the industry."
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