Fury as pro-choice activist gets £500k of taxpayer cash to write abortion book
‘Utterly outrageous’
MoRE than £500,000 of public money has been handed to a pro-abortion activist to write a book about the history of abortion in Britain.
The Arts and Humanities Research Council gave £512,000 to Professor Sally Sheldon to write a ‘biographical study’ of the 1967 Abortion Act.
Professor Sheldon is a trustee of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the largest provider of abortions to the NHS, whose executives have consistently called for abortion to be as freely available as contraception.
The law professor at the University of Kent was an architect of the private member’s bill to allow abortion to be carried out without legal restrictions for any reason up to birth put forward by the Labour MP for Hull, Diana Johnson, last month. She has been campaigning for abortion on demand for more than 20 years, has backed the termination of pregnancy on the grounds of the sex of the foetus, and is a key figure in the new We Trust Women campaign by BPAS to decriminalise abortion.
Professor Sheldon aims to present the results of her two-year taxpayer-funded study to Parliament in April 2018.
She will also produce teaching packs for schools and and a website for schoolchildren as part of the project.
Yesterday critics condemned the grant to Professor Sheldon as a major public subsidy for arguments in favour of abortion on demand at a time when the legal status of abortion remains a matter of acute political sensitivity. Robert Flello, Labour MP for Stoke- on-Trent South and cochairman of the All Party Parliamentary Pro-life Group, said: ‘Given that Diana Johnson has paid tribute to this woman, it would be amazing if the project was a fair and balanced account.
‘If public money is going to be used to fund work that is not only going to be a book but is going to fund materials going into our schools in support of pro-abortion propaganda then it is an utterly outrageous use of public money.
‘I would demand that the government department funding this put a stop to it and asked some very serious questions of how this situation could arise.’
He added: ‘At a time when people are not being able to get access to wheelchairs, when people are having hospital appointments delayed, to have public money squandered in this way is just disgraceful.’
Mr Flello said opinion polls revealed the public wanted abortion to be more tightly regulated and that there was an appetite for a reduction in the upper time limit even to the European average of 14 weeks or less.
Professor Sheldon has called the 1967 Act – which made abortion lawful with the approval of two doctors but prohibits abortions after 24 weeks unless the foetus has a disability – ‘a remnant of the attitude of a previous age’.
She has recruited three other academics to take part in her study, two of whom have publicly defended sex-selective abortions.
Maria Caulfield, Conservative MP for Lewes and a former medical researcher, said: ‘I welcome all types of medical research but my concern is that this money has been donated and will be used to fuel an argument that won’t necessarily be impartial.’
The Arts and Humanities Research Council is a funding body distributing taxpayer cash provided by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. The quango’s grants have included a payment of £50,000 for a Sheffield Hallam University study that recommended scrapping the terms ‘ladies’ and ‘gents’ from public toilets in case they offended transgender users.