After voting for the embryo procedures,MP's enter the more controversial part of the bill today when they discuss abortion.
Having just listened to two conflicting views on the Today programme it is hard to reconcile conscience over reality.
One proved that a foetus born at 22 weeks can live and survive as a healthy child,even after initially being abandoned by the medical profession.The other showing the heartache of what to do when 5 months into a pregnancy you discover that the baby will be born with many problems.
The consensus is that there will be some reduction from the current level of 24 weeks perhaps to 22 but on a free vote it is difficult to accurately forecast.
David Aaronovitch writes an interesting and rather controversial piece in this
morning's Times
The tiger leech, however, is a monstrously inefficient parasite compared with Britain's anti-abortion movement, which - always alert to the least possibility - has somehow leapt from its bush on to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, and may by this evening have won an improbable vote to curb the abortion rights of British women. While most of us were distracted, engaged in debating saviour siblings and hybrid embryos, Haemadipsa Restricta worked its way through our political underwear.
He asks
Is there significant evidence that the foetus is now significantly more viable at up to 24 weeks than was the case in 1967 or 1990, when the law was last changed?and his answer is no
the latest study has established that the survival rates for severely premature babies have not improved over the past 18 years. Hardly a single baby born at 22 weeks or under manages to leave hospital alive, and at 23 weeks 82 per cent fail to make it outside, the same percentage as in the mid-1990s.
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