BBC Radio 4's Law in Action will be broadcast on Friday 15 October, 2004 at 1600 GMT. Abortion law is under close scrutiny, after it was revealed that an NHS-funded charity is helping women to get illegal late abortions abroad.
The British Pregnancy Advisory Service says the lack of abortion services for women who are 20-24 weeks pregnant is a scandal. The charity is the UK's largest abortion provider, and carries out 80% of terminations after 20 weeks.
A UK charity has insisted it is not breaking the law by referring women abroad for late abortions. The Sunday Telegraph has reported that the British Pregnancy Advisory Service helps set up hundreds of late abortions without medical justification. BPAS says not referring patients abroad would be "morally reprehensible".
A judge is to be asked to institute criminal proceedings against the Spanish clinic which was exposed as carrying out illegal late abortions on hundreds of British babies. A denuncias - the Spanish term for an accusation of criminal activity - will this week be laid against the Ginemedex clinic in Barcelona, citing the extensive video and audio evidence collected by this newspaper, proving that it is flouting abortion laws. The judge will decide whether to order a full police investigation into the scandal, which was uncovered when staff at the clinic agreed to carry out an abortion on an undercover reporter who was 26 weeks, or almost six months, pregnant, even though both she and the baby were healthy.
A leading British provider of abortions did not break the law when it told women who wanted late terminations about a clinic in Spain that would perform them, a report by Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer for England, concluded last week. Professor Donaldson investigated the charity the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) after a newspaper reported that it was illegally referring women to Spain for abortions after 24 weeks’ gestation, the limit in Britain for abortions for "social" reasons. Professor Donaldson has decided that BPAS did not break the law by telling women about the Spanish clinic. But he criticised it for giving out the clinic’s telephone number too readily and for not giving appropriate advice to women seeking a late abortion.
The number of organ donors and transplantations fell last year in Spain, the country that leads the ranking in both and whose transplantations model was recently adopted by the EU. The decline—which signals a break in the increase seen in recent years—was caused largely by a sharp reduction in deaths from traffic incidents. Improved management of cerebral infarctions and a small increase in the refusal rate to donate organs among families whose relative has died have also contributed to the fall. The reluctance to donate is particularly widespread among the immigrant population. The number of organ donors in Spain dropped from 34.4 per million inhabitants in 2009 to 32 million in 2010, while the total number of registered donors fell from 1606 in 2009 and 1502 in 2010, reports the Spanish National Transplant Organisation. This reduction is the largest seen in the past 20 years.