John Reid, Labour Scottish Catholic MP, replied tartly that the most pressure he had come under was from organised write-ins by pro-Lifers.A small frisson of unease swept through the pro-abortion lobbies yesterday. Was it possible, as a last desperate gesture, clutching at straws, that the Tories might come out for a tightening of the abortion law? After all, it can be made to seem quite reasonable. As modern technology keeps foetuses alive at an earlier and earlier stage, so the legal date for abortion needs to be made earlier too.It is an argument to be strenuously resisted. Who needs late abortions? The most hopeless, desperate cases, the 14-year-olds who have no idea what is happening to them, the very stupid and the mentally retarded: all the people who would make the worst mothers. And if soon foetuses can be kept alive at any stage, will we ban abortion altogether?But the Conservatives could not be that foolish after Senator Dole’s experience. Clinton’s strongest pitch in winning the crucial women’s vote was his veto of a bill to outlaw late-term abortions. Dole’s flirtation with the pro-Lifers was the biggest of his many millstones Few can imagine Major making that mistake.

All the British polling evidence suggests even anti-abortionists do not switch votes against a pro-abortion candidate of their own party.The issue, together with contraception, is even sinking the Catholic Church, now in urgent need of a progressive Pope to rescind the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. Claire Short says the church has lost her generation of women. The National Abortion Campaign points to a poll now nearly 10 years old which shows that even then nearly a third of British Catholics supported abortion, twice as many as those who were strongly against.But so what? From a population of 58m, only some 7m practice any religion and most of them are moderate, so why should politicians worry? Religions are just one minority among myriads, though they get airtime out of all proportion to their numbers.Here they are a relatively minor menace but the Catholic Church’s stance on these matters continues to cause untold suffering round the world. There might be more sympathy if the Pope took into the Vatican all the unwanted street children of Catholic Brazil, born as a direct result of Catholic teaching.

Or if the pro-Lifers were as active about the massacres of those children as they are in defence of British foetuses.. The Sharia, the Muslim code of law, is a complex system of jurisprudence that does not interest the Western man in the street (oops, man and woman!). Understandably, therefore, the Western media does not pay it more than a passing, disparaging nod. Yet when a cause celebre involving Muslims explodes, one finds a sudden interest in the Sharia. This week, Debbie Parry and Lucille McLauchlan, two British nurses in Saudi Arabia, were charged with the murder of an Australian colleague, Yvonne Gilford.

Judging from the reaction of the British media, one would think the incident was one of the most significant developments of the fading year Of course, it was not. But all the elements of a cause celebre are here: “holy men” sitting in grim judgment; helpless women in “rat- infested” holes, and the grand finale, a public beheading.
One has the sickening feeling that some writers wanted the episode to end in a prophecy-fulfilling-itself beheading With the media, it is the story that counts. The human suffering triggered by the story is dismissed, in the same way that military commanders dismiss the loss of innocent civilian lives in an air-raid as “collateral damage”.Among the sensational reports, bits and pieces of the real Sharia inadvertently emerged. Readers learnt that it was up to a victim’s family to insist on retribution or pardon.

No one stopped to ponder this rather strange legal phenomenon, handing the power of life and death to the relatives of the victim.In fact, murder in the Sharia is a personal crime; the state is bound to respect the wishes of the victim’s family. Each year in Saudi Arabia, many killers are pardoned by the families of the victims, but this is hardly noted by the Western media, interested only in the number of executions. All students of Islam know that the Koran did not introduce the principle of retribution, but merely reaffirmed what the Old Testament said.What the Koran did introduce was the concept of pardon. The Koran gives relatives of a murder victim the absolute right to insist on a “life for a life” Yet the Koran heaps praise on those who forgive and pardon.