Midwives’ anger at lack of consultation on ‘no limit’ abortion
THE Royal College of Midwives is facing criticism after calling for abortion to be decriminalised without consulting its members on the issue.
The union, which represents almost 30,000 midwives and health workers, has said it gives its “full support” to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the UK’s biggest abortion provider, in its campaign for abortion to be removed from criminal law.
Prof Cathy Warwick, chief executive of the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), is also chairman of the board of trustees of BPAS.
A spokesman for the RCM confirmed it “did not consult on this issue”.
He said: “The RCM’s constitution allows for our members to elect the RCM Board and for this body to set our strategic objectives. The positions we take are based on these agreed objectives.”
It is currently against the law for women to terminate a foetus after 24 weeks unless there is a medical reason to do so, while abortions earlier in a pregnancy are only legal if two doctors agree to it.
But the RCM is backing calls for the legal limits to be scrapped and abortion to instead be regulated in the same way as other medical procedures, at the discretion of doctors.
Critics fear this could lead to more late-stage terminations and open the door to children being aborted based on their sex.
Last week, the RCM issued a formal position paper confirming it “supports the campaign to remove abortion from criminal law”, saying that “the continued criminalisation of abortion in the UK may drive women to access abortion services which are neither safe nor legal, and which may prove harmful or even fatal”.
A letter of protest to the board of the RCM disowning its stance and demanding it consult its members has now been signed by 200 midwives, according to Christian Concern, a campaign group. The letter says that decriminalisation “would mean the introduction of abortion up to birth for any reason” and says the signatories object to the “extreme position”.
It says: “It is out of keeping with what we take to be the ethic of our profession, as well as the consistently expressed wishes of British women with regards to the legality and regulation of abortion, and it has been taken with no consultation whatsoever of RCM membership.”
Judith Smyth, a midwife from Northern Ireland, said: “Anyone advocating allowing abortion up to birth I think is so sad and tragic, but to have my own representative body coming out in support of this extreme view is very disappointing.
“On something as big as this, she [Ms Warwick] should have consulted us.”
Sally Carson, a midwife from Chester, said: “Midwives are for delivering live babies wherever possible and trying to preserve the lives of those born prematurely. These babies are not tumours
‘Why could the RCM think it could do this without asking any of their members? I find it shocking’
that they can just remove.”
Michelle Viney, who has been a midwife for 15 years, said: “Why could the RCM think it could do this without asking any of their members? I find it so shocking.
“I financially support it, but I wouldn’t want to be paying a fee towards an organisation which is going to be campaigning for something which, morally, I one hundred per cent disagree with.”
Robert Flello, a Labour MP, said: “I am utterly and completely appalled by this abhorrent proposal. This wasn’t a minor policy shift by the Royal College of Midwives, it was a fundamental change and the reason they didn’t ask their members is because they knew they wouldn’t get it past them.”
Jim Shannon, a Democratic Unionist MP, said he will put a question in Parliament this week. “I will ask the Secretary of State for Health what discussions he has had, or will have, with the RCM and BPAS. My concern is that scrapping the 24-week cut-off would be absolutely disgraceful.”
When you think of a midwife, what comes to mind? In my case, that of the veteran of her calling whose contemptuous response maximised the misery of my swift, violent and agonising labour so efficiently that 25 years on, the shock of it remains etched on my brain.
Most gravid mothers have sweeter experiences. There is a reason why BBC One’s vastly popular Call the
Midwife has been commissioned for a sixth series, and it is that we love to believe that midwives, like nurses, are angels of resourcefulness and patience, never happier than when delivering an infant with nothing more sophisticated than a boiling kettle and some back copies of the Racing Post, drunken husband slumped in an adjacent armchair.
With that cosy image in mind, it seems puzzling the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) last week issued a public statement of support for a British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) campaign to decriminalise abortion entirely in the UK, no matter at what stage of the pregnancy – and unsurprising there was an immediate response from dissenting midwives, insisting that the RCM did not speak in their name.
In colloquial terms, the BPAS is an abortion charity, whose aims are pretty much the opposite of the RCM’s mission statement: to “promote excellence, innovation and leadership in the care of childbearing women, the newborn and their families”. The campaign that has united the BPAS and RCM follows the conviction last year of 24-year-old Natalie Towers, who was jailed for 30 months after being found guilty of administering poison to procure a late miscarriage. Her stillborn son, posthumously named Luke, was found in a lavatory by paramedics.
An objective observer taking a recent snapshot of 21st-century attitudes to childbirth might find herself in a state of some confusion. On the one hand, she might note, humans are so desperate for babies that a 70-something Indian woman has just given birth to her first child. Yet on the other side of the world, we are campaigning to allow the abortion of our own viable infants. We are a remarkably illogical species.
Logic and empathy are uneasy bedfellows, so our objective analyst of birth customs might have failed to notice the misery and confusion experienced both by women who long for children but cannot conceive and those who have but wish they hadn’t. But the human heart has little difficulty in reconciling those two contradictory positions. Which makes the RCM’s resolution all the more perverse.
Recent hideous cases of child murder remind us that there are undoubtedly worse things for an unwanted baby than early termination of pregnancy. But beyond the point at which an infant is capable of surviving outside the womb, two lives are involved, as current law acknowledges. To decriminalise abortion entirely is not just hypocritical – a denial of the exhilaration and hope with which we greet the news of infant Nepalese earthquake survivors – but a betrayal of the distraught mothers who seek late abortion.
Poor Natalie Towers had “a history of emotional and psychological problems”. So, frankly, does any mother who seeks a late termination for other than urgent medical reasons. If the RCM wants to improve the lives of childbearing women, both willing and reluctant, it needs to take a longer, more humane view than that envisaged by the BPAS campaign.