Recently, I’ve hoped that the trust Scots had in our Parliament could recover from the doldrums where it currently languishes. Last year’s Scottish Social Attitudes Survey found trust in the Scottish Government at its lowest level since Devolution, with less than half of us trusting it to act in our best interests.

Discovering the identity of the members chosen by the Government for its supposedly independent Abortion Law Review Expert Working Group, tasked with recommending possible changes to abortion laws has dealt my hopes a blow.

Of thirteen members, six are abortion providers or practitioners, six support a recent pro-decriminalisation report and two are linked to a group which campaigns for more liberal abortion laws.  Ten have already expressed a view in favour or represent organisations that support decriminalisation of abortion.  None represent a pro-life constituency or organisation.  

In terms of membership alone, the “expert group” lacks both credibility and legitimacy.

Its terms of reference expect members to be “respectful of all views and opinions expressed within the group” and yet, before a ball is kicked as it were, it has censored out any contradictory views and opinions, of which there are many, questioning the current liberality of our abortion laws.

Right off the bat, the expert group has established a ‘non-regression principle’ ensuring that their discussions and advice to the Government will countenance no reduction in time limits or grounds for abortion, no matter what evidence is presented.  While the norm in Europe is a twelve-week limit and Britain’s twenty-four weeks’ is now beyond the stage of viability.  Increasingly, babies born before twenty-four weeks will survive.  

Solid medical consensus holds that a unique human life begins at conception and a decent constituency of Scottish citizens concurs with the Catholic Church that this human life merits some social respect and legal protection at some point in the womb.  Many Scots raise an eyebrow at the description of abortion as healthcare when that abortion sadly ends another human life with all its potential.  

These reasonable positions merit a hearing in any expert group which the Government has set up and upon which it intends to depend. Yet, the Government has ensured that the group’s report will commend decriminalisation, effectively allowing the right to abortion for any reason up until birth.  

The set-up of this expert group will no doubt upset pro-lifers who already see it as a sham, but it will do more than that.  It will be another nail in the coffin of the trust Scottish citizens once placed in Government to treat them fairly, and of its claim to act with integrity.

ENDS