Whose Choice Anyway

'October 27th 1987 - the day before I present my bill to the Parliament - is the twentieth anniversary of Royal Assent being given to David Steel's Private Member's Abortion Bill. Twenty years ago David also drew third place in the ballot and he used his opportunity to tackle the obscenity of back-street abortions.

Since then nearly 3 million abortions have been undertaken and with over 170,000 abortions last year the trend is moving inexorably upwards. The back street has moved to the shop window and we have lost sight of the main objective: a sustained reduction in the total level of abortions - legal or illegal. Abortions are not lightly undertaken and I refuse to believe that the vast majority of the proabortion lobby actually believe abortion is of itself desirable.

'It is now almost twenty years since I joined the Liberal Party. It was a violent time. America was in Vietnam; the Soviet Union had invaded Czechoslovakia. In August 1968 protest marches were held in Derry. Martin Luther King had been shot dead; Robert Kennedy's assassination quickly followed. War and famine raged in Biafra and students were rioting in Europe. Just as I would challenge the assumption of the ever escalating arms race, I would also challenge the general levels of violence in our society today, ranging from the elderly lady beaten up and robbed in her own home to the violence of abortion. I have always seen abortion as violent and negative and without the assurance that this was a clear matter of conscience - and not a question of party policy - I could not have joined the Liberal Party. That remains my position to this day.

'The 1960s were a time of radical change. Liberals were properly in the vanguard of the movement which sought to enhance the rights of the individual and to challenge racist and minority restrictions. Yet not every change was for the good.

Look for example at the ugly, faceless, concrete monstrosities which litter so many of our cities. Built in the name of 1960s progress, they are all too often rejected by the people of the 1980s, products of an era where fashion and fad swept all before it and where rights but never responsibilities were the stuff of politics. In the throwaway, waste disposal society, we should today question the many assumptions which have turned Britain into a country where the value and quality of life receive only passing consideration.

'I do not come to the abortion issue from the moralistic position of the far Right; their lack of interest in justice and their espousal of self-centred economics hold no appeal for me. Fundamentalism and judgementalism in its various intolerant guises is sweeping the world and it poses a considerable threat to liberal values. No, my starting point is with J.S. Mill. Mill struck a proper balance between a person's rights and their responsibilities when he asserted that liberalism is about the exercise of freedom by the individual, save that in its exercise that freedom may not impinge on the rights of others.

'Almost a century later, in 1948, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights insisted that 'Everyone has the right to life.'