abortion

             Christian Attitudes to Abortion Abortion, the termination of a conceived foetus by medical methods is not natural, and would not be wanted or necessary in an ideal world. However, our world is not ideal and each year the amount of abortions rises. In 1996 there were 177,275 abortions in the UK, that's more than 600 a day carried out at NHS and private abortion clinics. The cases vary in reason, but one thing that must be made very clear is that in the UK, a woman does not have a right to an abortion. However, the current regulations protect and doctor from prosecution that performs one:- if they and a colleague honestly believe an abortion should be carried out. The first abortion law was the Offences Against the Person Act (1861) which made it a crime to "assist in attempting an unlawful abortion by any means whatsoever." At this time abortions were mainly carried out on the backstreets, illegally. For many women, who had no access to effective contraception at the time, this!
             was the only way to stop a pregnancy, which would usually be from a scandalous affair or relationship. Needless to say, these methods were very crude and must have caused intense pain for the mother. It was also very dangerous, because the clinical procedures were not advanced, and if some of the foetus was left in the womb then the woman would suffer from extreme poisoning which could be fatal. This law stood unchanged but in 1938 a gynaecologist was acquitted of an illegal abortion he had performed on a girl who had been raped. The court accepted that a woman's mental and physical state should be considered when deciding to abort. This set a precedent and was accepted as a amendment to the previous law. The situation was clarified under the Abortion Act of 1967 that was recently further clarified in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990. The situation today regarding abortion is as follows: A doctor may abort a pregnancy if...

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