Today's Situation: Science and Social Policy

Medical science can now provide women with complete security against unwanted childbirth. The great advances in contraception in the past few decades mean that sexual relationships need no longer be fraught with anxiety about unwanted pregnancy, an anxiety which has been a blight on the lives of virtually all women. The new methods of early abortion can further dispel that anxiety by providing a simple, non-traumatic solution to contraceptive failure. Yet we are faced with the absurd contradiction that these advances are being denied to women.

Contraceptives are not legally available to all. They are costly, they are not readily accessible and they may simply be denied by doctors who refuse to prescribe them for their own personal reasons.

The right to choose, which was never guaranteed before conception is certainly not available afterwards. The only socially sanctioned course of action following accidental conception is compulsory continuation of pregnancy. The law relating to abortion has been very strictly interpreted, some recent changes in interpretation are the subject of legal proceedings.

Sterilisation operations are refused women until they have satisfied a breeding/age quota arbitrarily fixed by gynaecologists who do not consider women fit to make such a decision for themselves. Sex education is a farce. By the time young people receive it they are already aware of how to produce a pregnancy; what they want to know is how to prevent one.