Lord Winston (Lab)

I thank the noble Baroness very much for her point, because I appreciate that she is giving me a brief rest during a very emotional speech in my case. I apologise for it being an emotional speech, but when you have dealt with such patients frequently for many years, you forget exactly how serious this can be. I have seen many women requesting terminations at all stages of their pregnancies, even very early and sometimes after in vitro fertilisation to get them pregnant. That is an extraordinary issue and you would not expect it to happen, but actually it happens throughout pregnancy. The women have such serious problems which may not show up as the kind of psychological problem that has been described. I do not believe that any woman goes through a termination of pregnancy lightly. She certainly does not want to damage herself and do her own abortion. That is an extremely rare situation. The risk here is that we are trying to make law which is just impractical, in the real sense of the word, when we have such a range of syndromes and a population in which we cannot in fact diagnose pregnancy all the time, and never will be able to in people, for example, who are very poor or otherwise live in very serious circumstances and are damaged.