This entry was posted on
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at
9:59 am and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

You may have missed Nadine Dorries’ bullshit sailing into print without question in the Liverpool Echo:

MPs face tough vote on lowering abortion limit

Mar 22 2008 by Ian Hernon, Liverpool Echo

FEW political issues raise such passion as abortion, and I am glad I am not forced to take sides.

That is a luxury that MPs from Merseyside and beyond will not have in coming weeks when parliament will vote on a controversial bid to lower the legal limit from 24 to 20 weeks.

But it is hard to ignore the fact that medical and scientific advances mean that premature babies now have a higher chance of survival outside the womb.

Leading the 20-week campaign is Nadine Dorries, a right-wing, working-class Conservative who was born in Liverpool and educated at the former Halewood Grange comprehensive school before becoming a nurse.

In her latest blog the Bedfordshire MP posted a picture of a surgeon operating on a spina bifida baby whilst still in the mother’s womb as he would not have survived otherwise.

“When the operation was over, baby Samuel, at 21 weeks gestation, put his hand through the incision in the uterus and grabbed hold of the surgeon’s finger, a gesture which was met with a huge amount of emotion in the operating theatre,” she wrote.

“The doctor said it was the most emotional moment of his life and that for a moment he was frozen, totally immobile.

“In the UK we are aborting babies just like this and older every day.”

I fully accept that there are also compelling arguments not to reduce the limit, not least to prevent a return to the cruel days of back-street abortionists.

But it is hard not to share the emotion felt by that surgeon and his team.

Is this the same Ian Hernon who; “has been a journalist since 1969 and a lobby correspondent since 1978 (with first-hand, inside information of what really goes on at Westminster)”?