The new pro-lifers

By Cristina Odone. She was editor of the Catholic Herald and deputy editor of the New Statesman (THE GUARDIAN, 29/03/06):

The stereotype of the anti-abortion activist was never particularly accurate. Victoria Gillick, fired by religious zeal and with a brood of children clinging to her apron strings, made for great copy and televisual images; but even back in the early 80s pro-life campaigns drew young professionals as well as Catholic morality mums. The new pro-lifers are different. They aren't freaks or fanatics; they are probably your neighbours. They may not volunteer to stuff envelopes or hand out leaflets for traditional anti-abortion organisations such as Life and Spuc (the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child). They don't evangelise and they certainly don't intimidate. They don't even regard abortion as a "sin". This new wave of pro-lifers hate abortion because they hate the waste of an egg. They are among Britain's growing number of infertile couples who, after years trying for a baby, and many cycles of IVF treatment, know just how precious that egg can be.

Pro-lifers in Britain were always different from their US counterparts. The murder of abortionists and fire-bombing of family-planning clinics were never adopted as tactics here. Intimidation via the internet, whereby people are targeted with hate messages (and often find their address and phone number listed for all the stalkers to read), has recently been imported from America by outfits such as the UK Life League. But James Dowson, the tattooed Orangeman who heads the UK Life League, boasts only a handful of followers, and his influence on the pro-life movement is scarcely felt - Life, Spuc and Core (Comment on Reproductive Ethics) reject outright the use of violence in their work.

Dowson, whose targets include a Catholic girls' school that offers sex education, made headlines this week. But he and his ilk will always be on the fringe of the anti-abortion movement. It is the new recruits who will bring the pro-life cause centre stage. Their presence may be difficult to quantify but, as Martin Foley of Life notes, "the rise in infertility represents a very powerful factor in today's pro-life movement".

Dowson's evangelical zeal to punish the sinners who murder an innocent life elicits little sympathy in a secular society. Far more powerful, to contemporary minds, is the appeal that the infertile pro-lifer projects: abortion as ingratitude. Infertility is now so much part of our culture that we are bound to know someone whose repeated tries for a baby have moved us to tears. Whatever our own convictions, it is hard not to share their revulsion for abortion as life snubbed. Who has not imagined, while stroking baby's head or watching their child play, what life would be like if they had not been possible?

For the 45,000 British couples who seek fertility treatment annually, the 200,000 terminations that take place each year are a personal insult: how dare anyone discard something that you yearn for so greatly? The woman who opts to abort has what you can't have - unless you spend a lot of money (£2,000 per cycle), risk potential health hazards and ride an emotional rollercoaster - is getting rid of the very object for which you are undergoing a series of painful injections and undignified examinations. She takes an hour or so to free herself of the foetus; you take months, years of successive cycles, to (maybe) create a new life. The envy that the barren feel for the fertile boils over into hatred when the proof of that fertility is cast off like a pair of dirty knickers.

For couples seeking assistance with conception, and for the 30,000 women who know they cannot have children naturally, the argument that legal abortion empowers the sisterhood holds little sway. Feminism, as has often been the case, becomes a casualty of fertility. It is horrible to think of the poor, ignorant or oppressed woman having to visit a backstreet abortionist because of new, stricter limits on termination. But if you've spent four years obsessed with having a baby, the horror of a seedy illegal abortionist seems bearable in comparison to the tragedy of not conceiving. Sisters are important, but babies always come first.

Infertile couples are making abortion an issue once again. Even without becoming activists they are reopening a debate that their parents thought finished. The climate of opinion has changed so much that 42% of Britons today would like the abortion law to be tightened from 24 to 22 weeks. You can't ignore them: they're probably your neighbours.