Via Iain Dale comes news of a meeting at Westminster arranged by Nadine Dorries in support of her ongoing efforts to reduce the upper time limit for legal abortions:

On 6.00pm-8.00pm, Monday 28th January 2008, from 6.00pm – 8.00pm, Nadine will Chairing a meeting in the Grand Committee Room, Palace of Westminster, London SW1A 0AA, titled, ‘Time to reduce the upper limit for abortion.’

Nadine said, “The Human Fertilisation & Embryology Bill opens up an opportunity to lower the 24 week upper limit for abortion for the first time in over 10 years .

The Science & Technology Committee report into abortion ignored crucial and valid evidence from world renowned experts that would have supported an amendment to the Bill. My minority report attempted to redress the balance; however, the Committee’s report will be used to inform MPs and ultimately influence their vote.

There were three experts who submitted substantial and ground breaking evidence and they are leading this debate: Professor Sunny Anand – Pioneer in research on foetal and neonatal pain. Professor of Paediatrics, Anaesthesiology, Pharmacology & Neurobiology at the University of Arkansas

Professor Stuart Campbell – Leading expert in 4D foetal imaging. Formerly Academic Head of the department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Kings College Hospital and President of the International Society of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Editor-in-Chief of the Medical Journal ‘Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynaecology’.

There will be a Q&A session after their presentations which will open the floor to questions from all attendees.”

Dorries, it has to be said, has a consistent track record of being, well, economical with the actualité when it comes to her participation in this particular debate to the extent that her ‘minority report’ still incorporates an unfounded and comprehensively refuted allegation relating to a ‘Bad Science’ article by Dr Ben Goldacre, which appeared in the Guardian during the course of the Science and Technology Committee’s deliberations.

(This same article, or rather the efforts of a number of bloggers to put Goldacre’s rebuttal to her via her ‘blog’ resulted in Dorries suddenly shutting down her comments facility and announcing that she was ‘too busy’ to deal with comments, before switching her story to make the unverified claim that she’d really stopped taking comments as a result of, allegedly, receiving abuse over her views on abortion.)

And judging from the line-up for tonight’s meeting there is to be no change in her modus operandii -taken together her reference to the debate being led by three experts who ’submitted substantial and ground breaking evidence’ (and ‘crucial and valid evidence’ to boot) to the committee, which the committee allegedly ‘ignored’ is a work of the most abject fiction.

Neither of the two experts named above, Professor Stuart Campbell or Dr K J S Anand, made any formal submissions to the committee although it did, in response to the histrionics of Dorries and others, make an effort to consider and comment on the relevance of their work, to whit:

4D images are 3D images that move in real time. 4D images of foetuses, a technology pioneered by Professor Stuart Campbell among others, show incredibly detailed images of 12 week foetuses appearing to stretch, kick and leap, 18 week foetuses opening their eyes and 26 week foetuses appearing to scratch, smile, cry, hiccup, and suck. It has been suggested that these images have altered the public perception of foetuses in a significant way, although this assumption has not been examined formally. We did not receive any written evidence from Professor Campbell, although we did ask some of our witnesses to comment on his work.

While 4D imaging is a useful technology in terms of identifying anatomical abnormalities, there have been no published scientific papers marking a contribution of 4D images to the scientific understanding of the neurobiology of foetal development and consciousness. Professor Maria Fitzgerald, from University College London, told us that In terms of 4D imaging, I do not think it has told us anything about the development of the nervous system. An image of a body tells you nothing about the nervous system. Professor Marlow added that [4D imaging] is helpful in terms of prediction of abnormality and therefore one is able to see structures that one would not see in ordinary, two dimensional, real time, 3D ultrasound. I do not think it tells us any more about foetal development than we probably knew already. This position is further supported by Professor Wyatt: at the moment I think the consensus is they do not add a great deal in terms of the science.

So far as Dr Anand’s work is concerned, the committee’s report deals with this between pages 22 and 25, starting with the following observation:

Although we did not receive evidence from Professor Sunny Anand, nor did any of those originally submitting evidence refer to his work or publications, we did consider a review article co-authored by him which was published recently, together with submission from Dr Stuart Derbyshire which offers commentary upon it and refers to Dr Anand’s earlier work in this area.

Although (and without wishing to sound cocky) you may prefer this commentary of my own, which, pretty accurately, anticipates the committee’s thinking and which (in comments) clarifies the circumstances under which Dr Anand’s work was considered by the committee by way of comments from Dr’s Anand and Derbyshire and Peter Saunders (of the Christian Medical Foundation), who also gave evidence to the committee.

Dorries neglects to name the third expert who will appearing tonight, which makes me wonder whether this may not be the aformentioned Professor Wyatt, whose evidence the committee was comprehensively demolished by Ben Goldacre (and by the committee) to the extent that, even having made a false and misleading ‘issue’ of Ben’s article, Dorries’ ‘minority report’ went on, here, to argue that Wyatt’s evidence should have been excluded from the final report:

As this is the science committee we regret that weight has been given in its report to evidence on both sides that has not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals. These findings should be removed from the report and should not be used to inform parliament (eg. EPICure 2, Dr Ellie Lee, UCLH neonatal survival rates [Wyatt's data]).

(One has to suspect that the reasoning behind her request for the removal of the UCLH data has more to do with the manner in which it was taken apart than any real concern of its lack of peer review, although had it been properly peer reviewed it was unlikely to have submitted in the first place – and, having tracked this story in detail, I would very interested to know whether it is, indeed, Prof Wyatt who is addressing the meeting as Dorries’ third expert witness).

Dorries’ efforts to advance an argument in favour of cutting the upper time limit for legal abortion carry all the hallmarks of Lenin’s adage that ‘a lie told often enough becomes the truth’… or at least that’s what she appears to believe if her performance as a member of the Science and Technology Committee is anything to go by – it’s worth also noting that Dorries claims to be ‘pro-choice’ rather than ‘pro-life’ (so long as the upper limit for abortions is reduced to a matter of nine weeks after conception) a claim by which she forfeits any claim to deserve being taken seriously – not that she has much of a claim anyway.

It says much that, for all that I disagree fundamentally with those who would see the right to abortion restricted only to situations in which the life of the mother is at serious risk or where a foetus is found to have a serious abnormality or have been conceived out of rape, i.e. on religious grounds, the one thing I can do is afford them a measure of respect for the honesty of their adopted position. They’re wrong, of course, but they’re at least honest and forthright in their views, qualities that are entirely lacking in Dorries’ efforts to start the 1967 Abortion Act on the road to repeal by a ‘thousand cuts’.

When all is said and done, for the time being, if there is one overriding reason why there should be no change in the law as it stands then it is because the single most important ‘voice’ in this whole debate remains noticeable only by its absence.

Forty years on from the legalisation of abortion, and due almost entirely to the manner in which the recording of the vast majority of abortions is ‘medicalised’ under the legal grounds of a continuation of a pregnancy constituting a risk to the physical/mental health of women, there has not been a single serious and substantive piece of research in the UK that seeks to understand, fully, why women choose to have an abortion and what factors prey most heavily on their mind in reaching such a difficult decision. If nothing else, it seems to me long past time that we acknowledged the reality of abortion – that in the majority of cases it takes place for what are palpably social reasons – by removing entirely the current system of purely medical classification of the legl grounds for abortion and, in doing so, open the possibility of seeing researching that will take us towards a clearer understanding of the difficult and complex decisions that women (and sometimes their partners) take when faced with an unwanted pregnancy.

As for Dorries, she can go to hell as far I’m concerned – or she could if such a place existed.

1. Pam Zavala

   Liberal Conspiracy » A lie told often enough… http://tinyurl.com/ydltewu