Abortion - Informed consent
We warmly support what the Under-Secretary of State for Health, Anne Milton, said in the House of Commons on 2 November last about the importance of ‘having in place informed consent, appropriate counselling and the right support’ for women facing a crisis pregnancy in order to ‘ensure that we do not fail them in the future.’ We therefore call upon the Government to act at once to ensure that every woman who seeks an abortion shall be fully informed of the risks to her physical and mental health of the operation and of the alternatives available to her, shall receive professional counselling and be allowed a cooling-off period between diagnosis of pregnancy and the operation. We also call upon the Government to give generous support to the pregnancy care and housing programmes which charities like LIFE provide – as it does to abortion-providing agencies such as BPAS, Marie Stopes, the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, etc.
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