HAVING campaigned on abortion for more than 20 years, Ann Furedi is used to attacks from the crank fringe of the “pro-life” lobby. Once, when our families were on holiday together in France, I recall reading aloud from
The Times that she had been added to the death list of “serial baby-murderers” on an American website.
Today, she faces a challenge from opponents less violent but rather more threatening. As chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the leading abortion charity, she has been accused by a national newspaper of helping women to obtain illegal late abortions in Spain.
“They have got Joanna Jepson, the young blonde curate prompted a police investigation of doctors who aborted a fetus with a cleft palate, lined up as the champion on the side of good,” Furedi told me. “Now they are trying to personalise the pro-choice side by setting up BPAS, and me in particular, as the personification of evil illegal abortions.”
An undercover reporter from the Sunday Telegraph, claiming to be 26 weeks’ pregnant — beyond Britain’s legal limit of 24 — alleges that when she requested an abortion, BPAS referred her to a Barcelona clinic where she was offered a termination and told that staff would falsify records.
John Reid, the Health Secretary, has reportedly asked the Chief Medical Officer to investigate. Ann Widdecombe MP, the former Conservative minister, has tabled a parliamentary motion calling for the immediate withdrawal of “£12 million of government funding” from BPAS and for the charity to be closed down.
The Sunday Telegraph alleges that Furedi runs BPAS as a “crusader”. In a rare personal column, Dominic Lawson, the paper’s editor, claimed that Furedi has a “fundamentally political motivation” to provide abortions regardless of the law. In years to come, he argued, her views on women’s rights to late abortion “will seem as barbaric and bizarre as the advocacy of slavery and forcible sterilisation seems to us today”.
The paper seemed particularly incensed by her refusal to apologise, making a banner headline out of her initial “insouciant” response: “So what is your point, exactly?” So is Furedi, Britain’s Madame Abortion, a hard-faced, baby-hating harridan? That unattractive image does not match the woman I know, now a 43-year-old soccer mum, whom I have always thought of as a bit of a softie at heart, from her kitten heels to her adopted cats. But she is a tough and unapologetic customer when something she believes important is at stake — such as the service BPAS provides to women in need.
“We provide a legal abortion service up to 23 weeks and 5 days of pregnancy. Beyond that, we advise women that they cannot get a legal abortion in Britain. Very occasionally, if a woman is still insistent, we give publicly available contact numbers for clinics in Europe and the US which are able to carry out a legal abortion service beyond that. BPAS has done this for at least ten years, and no one has ever questioned whether it is legal or whether it’s the right thing to do. The real problem is not that women are getting abortions too late, but that many who contact abortion services at 19-20 weeks aren’t able to get one because the waiting list takes them beyond the legal time limit.”
Why do women come this late? “Very often it is younger teenagers who have found out late that they are pregnant, panicked, kept putting off telling their parents, hoping it will just go away. Other women start off with a wanted pregnancy, then suddenly their life changes utterly. We are often told that women take decisions about abortion too lightly. In my experience, they are usually pushed into the later stages of pregnancy because they are wrestling with the most difficult of choices.”
Furedi’s personal views are clear. “I have always believed that abortion should be available to women as early as possible, and as late as necessary.”
But she scoffs at any notion that BPAS is run as her personal political crusade. “BPAS has existed since 1968, immediately after abortion was legalised. I have been chief executive for 16 months, during which there have been no policy changes. As well as advice, we provide about 48,000 abortions a year — a quarter of those in the UK. Contrary to the impression given by Ann Widdecombe, we do not receive direct government funding. Primary healthcare trusts contract their service to BPAS. This gives the best of both worlds — the treatment is free, but provided in specialist clinics by skilled and experienced doctors and staff.
“That’s why this has made me so angry. It’s one thing for the media to put me under pressure, although it was a shock to find TV crews camped outside my house. But it is absolutely despicable and exploitative when a journalist lies to our frontline call centre staff in an attempt to trick them into going beyond what they are legally allowed to do.
“I am proud that even the published transcripts demonstrated that our staff would not provide them with anything illegal, and that our action line operators dealt compassionately with what they thought were women in distress. But they are now in a terrible position. When a woman phones, at the back of their minds is the question, is this a journalist? It seems clear that we are dealing with a newspaper pursuing a political agenda. It is hypocritical that they can say I am influenced by my ideological views, while their paper is clearly driven by the belief that the abortion law is too liberal and interpreted too liberally.
“I think that the anti-abortion lobby know that legal abortion is here to say, so they focus on certain areas of how the law is interpreted. They know there is a visceral unease about late abortions — it seems a horrible thing unless you can put it in the context of the individual woman’s reason. Or they focus on abortion for fetal abnormality, as in the cleft palate case, to play on public concerns about respecting disability.”
Ann has a nine-year-old son with her husband Frank Furedi, the author and sociology professor. In recent years it has become fashionable for prominent feminists to reconsider their support for abortion once they have children. So how does she reconcile being a mother with being a diligent abortion provider? “I struggled for some years with infertility while working for family planning organisations. When I went for infertility treatment, the nurses would say it must be terrible, helping other women terminate pregnancies while you’re trying to get pregnant.
“But my view has always been that they are two sides of the same coin. Infertile women who want to get pregnant, and women who are pregnant and don’t want to be, are both women out of control of their reproductive future. I believe that a woman should be able to make decisions about her own reproductive life.
“I eventually got pregnant unexpectedly after I had packed in fertility treatment. It was a total shock and I was delighted. I had an easy pregnancy and enjoyed it enormously. But I was also deeply aware that all the changes I experienced, which are so overwhelming and wonderful when you want to be pregnant would be terrifying if it was not what you wanted.”
I remind her of that day in France when we discovered over breakfast that she was on a death-list. “I can shrug off some crank anti-abortionist threatening me. But this sort of thing has serious consequences. They are attacking the best abortion system you can get. If I had a daughter who was pregnant and did not want to be, I would want her treated in one of our clinics. If people disagree with me ideologically, that’s fine. But don’t go for the service that I run. Suppose they were to succeed in shutting us down? What would happen to those 50,000 women a year with pregnancies they do not want?”
