And it oviously touched a nerve. No doubt you see yourself as the kind of twat I describe.

As arguments go, that’s really sophisticated…good luck with your GCSE’s by the way.

Err, that’s actually the point of making the data public, isn’t it?

(I should reveal here, for those that don’t know, that I personally am vehemently anti-abortion, whenever, for whatever reasons. But having revealed that, back to the main point.)

We are told that late abortions are only ever made because of the incredibly difficult decisions concerning disability. The law is, for better or worse, that up to 24 weeks this is not a person, the foetus, something less than human which does not have the law’s protection to the right to life. After 24 weeks it is, except…..

We also are told that there is some (very small) number of late abortions.

Allow me to make an analogy: with capital punishment. Yes, harsh and so on. But this country for at least a couple of centuries has not had capital punishment at the level of 167 executions a year. But it does have a late abortion level of 167 a year. We all would be, left and right, religious and not, be screaming blue bloody murder if there were 167 executions a year if someone told us that, well, no, we’re not allowed to know the details of why this happened.

The law, as it stands, says that a foetus past 24 weeks is a human being worthy of the same protections as the rest of us in its and our right to life. We can argue about whether that is so till the cows come home….but if that is indeed the law then we really do want to know whether that right has been denied in just the same manner as we want to know whether, under a system of capital punishment, a human being has been executed unfairly (or in error, however you wish to put it).

The very point of releasing the figures is, to my mind, exactly the same as would be that everyone gets a fail trial. The law says that late abortions can only be done on those who are less than fully human for reasons of disability.

So, were they?

Yes, I agree some elements of the anti-lobby can be particularly motivated but that, imho, is not sufficient to argue against statistical openness. Certainly an issue to consider deeply though.

The clustering issue is an important one and certainly warrants the release of data to individual hospital level into the research community and to clinical governance, I’m just not sure its a strong enough argument for a full public release given the known risks.

The data will certainly be anonymised but the anti-lobby is highly motivated to get hold of this data in the belief that’ll find something they can build a ‘foetus in a bucket’ story out of and to be honest, having spent a lot of time on this issue, I wouldn’t like to bank on the law being a sufficient deterrent.

The torygraph is very much pro right wing American Republican, which is anti abortion, and has been pushing their agenda on the UK for years. The head of the Catholic church in the UK says he wants a more American style politics in this country regarding abortion. ( I guess that means he would also like to see doctors shot who carry out abortions.)

The point is the anti abortion movement is the same the world over, Late term 24 weeks, 20 weeks it is all the same to them. They want all abortion banned. If they can’t do it in one go then they will happily try salami style slice by slice.

And I don’t need to remind you that both the Catholic church and the American anti abortion movement are anti contraception.(Both are well promoted by the Torygrapgh,) In fact, the American anti abortion movement have made it clear that once they get abortion banned they will start trying to get Contraception banned.

They pretend that it is all about morality, and pleasing their pretend cloud man in the sky, but actually it is about men who just hate woman having power over their own bodies. As has been said before if men could get pregnant abortion would be legal all over the world in a heartbeat,

Next time the Daily torygraph is spouting about govt regulations, we can remind them that they want the govt to control womans bodies, because they just hate the idea of woman having sex for fun.

Scary world you righties are trying to build…

Well, no, “it was foetus”, the whole point of abortion being turning a foetus into a not-foetus, surely?

So let me be clear because I am not sure I understand.

Your position is that anyone who believes that abortion is morally wrong or perhaps even debatable, is mentally derranged?

Because it appears to me that abortion is clearly something that is a deeply moral issue, and that alternative views of varying degrees of restriction on abortion are held by sane people across the spectrum of the abortion debate, and these views are rational.

I find it impossible to imagine that anyone, including yourself can not agree with the assertion that the mother-unborn child relationship, and where the line is drawn is at the very least contestable.

Parliament has determined the current compromise, but obviously such a compromise must be subject to constant review in the light to changes in technology and society.

One way the review happens in a rational way, is for all the data to be published reguarly and not to allow anyone to hide behind conspiratorial notions that naturally fill the space which otherwise non-publication would leave.

On course you might of the view that abortion should be allowed right up to and post term. (I have heard it seriously argued) and therefore you might be in my eyes a “nutter”.

I would be interested in your view of abortion just so I can judge where on the nutty scale you sit, and therefore form an informed judgement of why you think being pro life is comensurate with being insane.

As the author suggests (and hasn’t been addressed in comments to date) there is a need to deconstruct the claims made by these pressure groups to try to move towards a more rational debate

That is authoritarian rubbish. The public’s right to access information is a legitimate right which should only be abrogated if there’s a clear threat to the rights of other people (eg giving the whereabouts of someone who has testified against a gang member; naming a child who has been the subject of abuse). Some people may then dishonestly cite data to back up their arguments, but that is not an argument for refusing to release the figures. If people use data in ways which you dislike, tough: get out there and say how they have distorted the information and why you think their arguments are wrong.

It might help matters if I put some numbers to the problem.

The last published set of national abortion statistics showed, IIRC, 147 abortions conducted after 24 weeks on grounds of serious disability of which 12 we listed under ‘other’ and not allocated an ICD code.

For non-geeks, the ICD code tells to the type of disability/condition that the foetus was subject to

Now, on principle, it would be better that these cases were properly coded and the information released at a national level, and if that is all that was being aimed for here it would not prove problematic – in fact, up until 2003, all such cases were fully coded.

The problem arises because once an anti-abortion group gets this full data set, the very next thing they are likely to do – and almost certainly will do – is start firing off FOIA’s to every NHS hospital in England and Wales asking for the same breakdown for any post-24 week abortions carried out at the hospital in an effort to trace each of the newly coded cases to a specific hospital.

That’s what happened in 2003 and, IIRC, it actually went further and the family itself was identified.

The optimum solution would be one in which the data is fully coded in the national stats – which is all that’s needed to inform the public debate – but exempt from disclosure at regional, local and individual hospital level, an arrangement that could probably only be put fully into place and locked in via the High Court.

How does it follow? You have stated some positive facts(ish), but how to do they bare on normative values. Also, isn’t there a more fundamental inequality that this agenda misses, that of coercon. I mean, that the state gives some people the power to coerce others to do their bidding, and not the reciprocal power to everyone else. There does not seem to be a greater example of an inequality to me than that.

Fuck me, bro.

My two cents:

A belief system is not an ethical agenda – it is merely a belief system. To follow the Lord, or Allah, is a personal choice that has no basis in fact. You choose to believe or not to believe in an Almighty, same as you choose to believe or not believe in Santa.

Equalities agendas have their place in civilised life because their essences are factual – men and women are of equivalent intelligence, as are people of all races, and of different sexual orientation, etc. It is also a fact that we are born into those groups – we don’t choose our gender (or gender preferences), or race, etc. We are born. It follows that everyone should have equal opportunities for education, healthcare, employment and so on. One should not be discriminated against on the basis of the facts of one’s birth.

Following God, on the other hand, is a choice. You ain’t born with the Lord. You kind of pick him off a shelf. And that’s fine, except when you start to insist that others follow your lead. That goes for all belief systems.

HOWEVER – we do have to continually fight for equalities agendas on the political scene and are exposed to exactly the sort of scrutiny and pressure you propose we are exposed to. Not sure why you’d think that questioning equalities agendas and taking the piss out of people who propose them would be going somewhere new. Happy clappers are of course entitled to try and push themselves and their wacky views to the fore of political discourse in the same way – I was simply indicating above that I personally wish that they would fuck off, and that blouses like Gordon Brown wouldn’t tiptoe round abortion law hoping not to offend anyone who might a) believe in Jesus and b) vote Labour.

Etc