Whatever we may think about abortion, shouldn’t everyone brought up in our tradition of free expression feel uneasy about this week’s decision to ban pro-Life campaigners from setting up shop outside a clinic where terminations are performed?

Before I go any further, I should declare an interest. My wife is a strongly committed pro-Lifer, who works for the boss of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC)— and although my views are perhaps not quite as uncompromising as hers, I am firmly on her side in the debate.

I wish that people wouldn’t close their minds to SPUC’s arguments.

Whatever we may think about abortion, shouldn’t everyone brought up in our tradition of free expression feel uneasy about this week’s decision to ban pro-Life campaigners from setting up shop outside a clinic where terminations are performed?

Indeed, it’s a measure of how dominant and intolerant social liberalism has become in modern Britain that Mrs U has come to dread being asked what she does for a living.

It’s not that she’s ashamed of her job —on the contrary, she’s proud of it and enjoys the fulfilment of working for what she regards as a hugely important cause.

It’s just that in the metropolitan, middle-class circles in which we move, you will often hear a sharp intake of breath around the dinner table when she mentions she works for SPUC.

Reaction

A frisson of embarrassment tends to grip the company, putting a dampener on the whole evening, as if she had confessed to working for the Ku Klux Klan.

In fact, of course, my wife’s views on the moral value of human life, from the moment of conception to the grave, are shared by billions of people around the globe.

They are held by every mainstream world religion and church — Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and more — and have been espoused by philosophers for millennia.

Yet this cuts no ice at the parties we attend, on the increasingly rare occasions when we’re asked. Imagine the reaction at a BBC staff meeting if anyone were to admit to supporting Brexit, and you’ll get the idea.

I should also declare that my wife donates a modest monthly sum (or to be more accurate, I give it at her instigation, since my higher tax rate makes the gift aid top-up worth more) to a charity called the Good Counsel Network (GCN).

This is one of those affected by Tuesday night’s Public Space Protection Order, issued by Ealing Council in West London to keep campaigners away from the entrance to the local Marie Stopes abortion clinic.

Now, with my weakness for seeing both sides of an argument, I can well understand the thinking behind the council’s order.

For more than two decades, six days a week, 52 weeks of the year, members of the GCN have gathered on the grass verge outside the clinic to pray, sing hymns and try to persuade pregnant women to seek alternatives to abortion.

Indeed, it’s a measure of how dominant and intolerant social liberalism has become in modern Britain that Mrs U has come to dread being asked what she does for a living

As anyone can imagine, this must be irritating to local residents. Nor is it hard to see that it could be upsetting to women who’ve taken the traumatic decision to terminate and don’t want anyone to renew any doubts or try to change their minds at the last moment.

Let me also put it on record that I do not for one moment defend the bullying tactics allegedly adopted by some anti-abortion protesters outside clinics.

No matter how strongly they may feel about the sanctity of human life, it strikes me as cruel to shout ‘murderess’ at women arriving for terminations, or to torment them by calling them ‘mum’ and thrusting teddy bears into their hands.

How much this goes on, I just don’t know. It is even possible that rogue members of the GCN may have resorted to such conduct, which is said to be increasingly widespread among anti-abortionists in the U.S.

All I can say, because I have Mrs U’s word for it, is that the people who run the group disapprove strongly of bullying and regard it as counter-productive. They see it as their mission to show kindness to women who may be having doubts and to offer them practical help with alternatives — whether financial support, within their limited resources, or advice on putting babies up for adoption.

Fanatics

In the huge majority of cases, perhaps needless to say, their efforts come to nothing. But on those rare occasions when they succeed in persuading women to carry a pregnancy through to childbirth, the results are often profoundly moving.

They say the mothers concerned almost always bless them ever afterwards for talking them out of abortion and helping them through.

Yet from the way groups such as the GCN are portrayed in the liberal media, you would think these kindly, predominantly mild-mannered and middle-aged Christians were dangerous fanatics, spewing religious hatred.

I think of a Channel 4 Dispatches programme — entitled Undercover: Britain’s Abortion Extremists — which claimed to have ‘infiltrated’ the network. Complete with wobbly shots from a ‘hidden camera’ and indistinct recordings with subtitles, it was made to appear almost as if the documentary makers had risked their lives to unearth the truth behind a sinister terrorist organisation.

Yet GCN has never made the slightest secret of its mission, methods or purpose, while the programme told us nothing that we wouldn’t have learned if the camera had been held rock-steady and in full view, with a decent quality sound recording.

This kind of casual dishonesty is typical of campaigners who call themselves pro-Choice (by which naturally they mean a woman’s choice of whether or not to abort — never an expectant father’s, let alone that of an unborn life).

All too often, they speak in euphemisms, designed to strip the abortion issue of any moral dimension, as if ending a potential human life has no more profound significance than having an appendix removed.

Take this week, when a councillor interviewed on the news after Tuesday’s vote said that Ealing had struck a blow to protect women seeking a ‘legally available healthcare treatment’.

Honest

Well, no one denies that abortion is legally available. But a ‘healthcare treatment’? Under the letter of the 1967 Abortion Act, that’s what it ought to be, since terminations were supposed to be permitted only when two doctors certified independently that continuing a pregnancy would injure the physical or mental health of the woman or existing children, or if the baby was likely to be born severely handicapped.

But let’s be honest. While, yes, some cases genuinely meet these criteria, the great majority of the 190,406 abortions carried out in the UK in 2016 simply don’t. Only by stretching the meaning of the words ‘injury to health’ to snapping point does healthcare come into the equation.

Or take that oft-repeated platitude of the pro-Choice lobby: ‘No woman takes the decision to have an abortion lightly.’ Again, this is true of a great many women who will testify that the decision was one of the most agonising of their lives.

But ‘no woman’ decides lightly? How, then, can it be explained that nearly 40 per cent of those 190,406 operations performed in 2016 were repeat terminations?

No, the fact is that abortion is increasingly seen as an accepted and commonplace procedure, with doctors and clinics ignoring the law and simply rubber-stamping applications, with no questions asked.

It has come to the point where an encounter with groups such as the Good Counsel Network can be a pregnant woman’s first contact with anyone prepared to put the other side of the argument, and reinforce instinctive doubts that so many women feel.

Many of us have met women who went through with abortions and say they’ve bitterly regretted it ever since.

Isn’t it a desperately sad reflection on our society that this historic Public Space Protection Order was directed not against violent demonstrators, yelling hatred of our way of life, but against well-meaning Christians, trying to do good?