The British Abortion Act (1967), which came into effect in April 1968, has recently passed its fiftieth anniversary. While sometimes heralded as an early achievement of the feminist movement, the Act was in fact inspired by concerns with public health and social justice.  Prior to 1968, poor women facing unwanted pregnancies would seek out illegal, often dangerous ‘backstreet’ abortions, whereas wealthier women might access expensive, professional services.  After 1968, all that was to change.  As one senior gynaecologist noted somewhat ruefully,

‘all in all, we [in the RCOG] did not expect a very great change in practice from that obtaining before the Act. We thought there would be a slightly more liberal attitude to the problem, for that, after all, was the purpose of the new law. How wrong we were. I am afraid that we did not allow for the attitude of, firstly, the general public, and, secondly, the general practitioners.’^[1]

While less than 3,000 legal abortions had been reported in England and Wales in 1962,^[2]there were over 167,000 in 1973, just five years after the Act’s implementation.^[3]  David Steel, who as a young Liberal MP had introduced the Act, welcomed the fact that these women had ‘come openly through their family doctors instead of risking a back-street operation of the kind responsible for about thirty deaths a year’.^[4]  Others were less pleased.  Ian Donald, Regius Chair of Midwifery at the University of Glasgow, clinical father of obstetric ultrasound, and a founding member of the Society Protection for Unborn Children, lamented the fact that the British public appeared to perceive the legislation ‘as indicating the right to abortion on demand’.^[5]

It is impossible to know how far these rocketing numbers reflected an absolute rise in the incidence of terminations or whether they simply recorded the displacement of backstreet abortions into hospitals and clinics.  However, the impact on the NHS was undeniable.  With no additional resources made available to meet the surge in demand, many facilities were unable to cope, and private and charitable service providers took up the slack.

With the Abortion Act at the vanguard of a wave of liberalising legislation across the western world, women also arrived in large numbers from overseas to access the services that were yet to be made available in their own countries.  Over 53,000 women travelled to England and Wales to end pregnancies in 1974 alone, the majority of them from France.

Today, the legal framework laid down by the Abortion Act is well embedded. While abortion remains controversial, a solid majority of British adults are broadly pro-choice;[6]almost all terminations for resident women are funded by the NHS;[7]and one in three British women will end a pregnancy at some point during her lifetime.  Far fewer women now travel to access abortion services in Britain, with numbers soon to drop still lower, given the recent referendum vote in favour of legalising abortion in the Republic of Ireland.  Indeed, criticisms are increasingly made not that the Abortion Act is too liberal, but rather that it is too restrictive.  In this sense, it is asked whether abortion should still be conceived as a criminal – rather than health law – issue; whether it is right for women to face clinically unnecessary hurdles when seeking to end unwanted pregnancies; and why Northern Irish women still have to travel to access the services available to women elsewhere in the UK.  In light of such criticisms, it seems unlikely that the Abortion Act will survive another five decades.

[1]T.R.T. Lewis, ‘The Abortion Act (1967): Findings of an Inquiry into the First Year’s Working of the Act conducted by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’, British Medical Journal, 2 (1970), 529-35.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Registrar General’s Statistical Review of England and Wales, Supplement on Abortion for 1973.

[4]Wellcome Library, SA/ALR/G.69, D. Steel, Speech to the AGM of the Abortion Law Reform Association, ‘Abortion Act Vindicates 16 years of Effort’, 19 October 1968.

[5]Ian Donald, ‘Naught for your Comfort’, Journal of the Irish Medical Association, 65 (1972), p. 286.

[6]http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-30/personal-relationships/abortion.aspx

[7]https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/abortion-statistics-for-england-and-wales-2017

The Families Through Surrogacy conference focuses on providing expert advice and information to all parties involved or looking to be involved in surrogacy. A broad-spectrum of organisations including IVF clinics, law firms and Surrogacy Agencies were present to give information about their role in the process, as the main aim of this conference is to develop a community in which both surrogates and intended parents are correctly counselled on all aspects of entering into a surrogacy agreement.

As scientists in the field of Reproductive medicine, it can be easy to become oblivious to the emotions experienced by the patients you’re treating. By attending this conference we were given the opportunity to speak with surrogates and intended parents, giving us a new insight into their perspective and experience of assisted reproduction. Also, listening and talking to specialist lawyers we came to better understand the ethics surrounding surrogacy and other assisted reproductive methods.

We would like to thank Professor Darren Griffin for the opportunity to attend this conference since it has allowed us to widen our knowledge and understanding of the different practises involved in a Reproductive medicine career.

Natasha Athanasiou & Maisie Meadows

A commentary of the recent Fertility 2018 event, by Georgia Everett

From 4^th-6^thJanuary, the Association of Clinical Embryologists, British Fertility Society and the Society for Reproduction & Fertility held their 11^thjoint conference, Fertility 2018. The event, held at the ACC Arena in Liverpool, is put on to showcase the most cutting-edge research and developments in the field of reproductive biology and fertility.

I attended the conference to present a poster of my research conducted as part of my MSc Reproductive Medicine: Science and Ethics thesis jointly with City Fertility, an IVF centre based in London. My poster explored whether algorithms installed in time-lapse imaging systems, specifically the EmbryoScope incubator, are as good or better than embryologists at choosing the embryo(s) for transfer most likely to result in a clinical pregnancy.

The conference itself was packed full of interesting lectures from clinicians and researchers worldwide. The first day focused on male fertility, followed by female fertility and then embryos and offspring on the consecutive days after, with the general focus of the conference being on environmental influences on fertility.

Notable sessions included the future of IVF, detailing the upcoming field of robotics and how it can be used to ‘carry’ immotile sperm into the egg and other new developments including next-generation sequencing on embryonic DNA left behind in culture media. Another interesting lecture was presented by a researcher from the University of Adelaide, exploring how maternal obesity at the time of conception can damage the mitochondrial DNA in the egg, leading to slower embryo development and an increased likelihood of obesity in the offspring.

In addition to laboratory research, there were some fascinating sessions on the ethical conundrums within fertility including the effect of fertility education at school, the impact of a diagnosis of azoospermia on male identity and, of course, the horror that is the postcode lottery in IVF funding. As a scientist, it was refreshing to analyse my everyday work from an alternate angle and puts you in the position of the patient, enabling us to improve the patient experience from our side of the process.

There was opportunity for interesting debate and discussion both within the lectures and the coffee breaks, which, in itself, showed the high quality of the material presented to us throughout the conference. The lectures were thought-provoking and excited the field about the prospects that lay ahead of us. The conference returns for Fertility 2019 next January in Birmingham – it will be interesting to see how much of the research presented at this year’s event has made real progress in the field throughout the year to come.

Date: Wednesday 21st March

Venue: Moot Chamber, Widoger Building, Kent Law School, University of Kent

Timings:

1.30pm Coffee and Welcome

2-3.15pm ‘The future of abortion: the case for decriminalisation’

Discussion with opening comments from Professor Sally Sheldon (Kent Law School) and Ann Furedi, CEO, British Pregnancy Advisory Service and author “The Moral Case for Abortion”

5-6pm Drinks Reception and meet the author with Ann Furedi

All welcome. Please register for a free ticket at eventbrite or contact Verity Pooke at vp238@kent.ac.uk for more information.

As technology has expanded sex robots have become increasingly lifelike, bringing about a need for a revolution in how we think about sex, morals and the legal status of these sex robots, according to Kent Law School’s Professor Robin Mackenzie. …

Robin said: “Humans having sex with other humans who are unable to consent to sex, like children and adults lacking decision-making capacity, is seen as unlawful and unethical. So is human/animal sex. Such groups are recognised as sentient beings who cannot consent to sex with interests in need of protection. “Sentient, self-aware sex robots created to engage in emotional/sexual intimacy with humans disrupt this tidy model. “They are not humans, though they will look like us, feel like us to touch and act as our intimate and sexual partners. While they will be manufactured, potentially from biological components, their sentience, self-awareness and capacity for relationships with humans mean that they cannot simply be categorised as things or animals. “Ethicists, lawmakers and manufacturers treat robots as things, but future sex robots are more than things.

“Robotic animated sex-dolls, able to simulate human appearance, assume sexual positions and mimic human conversation and emotions are on sale now. These are things, neither sentient nor self-aware, incapable of relationships or intimacy, as described in the Foundation for Responsible Robotics report just released.” … The report stated: “On the one hand, if a sex robot is designed to resist sexual advances such that their use constitutes a simulated act of rape, then building them puts the user in relationship with the act of raping a woman. It exhorts and endorses rape. On the other hand, building a robot that is passive or elicits sex is ethically problematic for what it communicates to the broader public about women’s sexuality.”

https://wentworthreport.com/2017/11/20/sex-robot-shock-increasing-sophistication-of-ai-will-cause-massive-issues-experts-warn/

A study by researchers from the Universities of Amsterdam, the VU University in Amsterdam and pour own Robbie Sutton has found that that “religiosity, political orientation, morality, and science understanding” are the main predictors of whether or not someone accepts a scientific consensus.

There’s nothing wrong with being skeptical. There is, however, a difference between skeptical claims without substantial evidence to back them up, and being a skeptic on vaccines or human-driven climate change. Both are backed up by a gigantic mountain of facts, so why are certain groups of people still keen to rally against them? This new study gives a clue, linking pre-existing beliefs in spirituality, religion, and political ideas with such forms of science denial. Importantly, however, different ideologies are correlated with the acceptance of different types of consensus. If you’re a climate change skeptic, for example, you’re more likely than not to be a political conservative. If you wonder if vaccines are safe or not, you probably have concerns about moral purity. If you’re a skeptic about GM crops, it’s most likely because you don’t have much trust in science, or you lack a scientific literacy. As expected, those that are staunch religious conservatives “consistently display a low faith in science and an unwillingness to support science” across the board.

This research highlights that scientific knowledge is not always directly correlated with acceptance of it. Thanks to plenty of other “ideological antecedents” – those pre-existing belief systems – it’s a little more complicated than that. This suggests that, for example, if you want to convince your anti-vaxxer friend that vaccines are nothing to be afraid of, it may take a little more than factual information to succeed.

http://www.iflscience.com/brain/heres-how-your-beliefs-are-linked-to-different-types-of-science-denial/