Conscientious Objection (Medical Activities) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I was unable to speak at Second Reading and I apologise for that—I was at a family funeral, as it happens—but I feel strongly about this issue. I qualified in 1964. I was a medical student and a junior hospital doctor in the days before the Abortion Act of the noble Lord, Lord Steel. I remember well the gynae wards and the women who had had unsafe, septic abortions. Some of them died. In the early 1970s, I was working in Birmingham in general practice and family planning, when the professor of obstetrics and gynaecology refused to have anything to do with the new Abortion Act. The noble Lord, Lord Winston, might know more about management in those days than I do but, because the professor was in charge of what his department provided, he absolutely forbade abortion to take place in that department. Perhaps the noble Lord remembers him.