TV Scope Dispatches - Abortion: what we need to knowWednesday, 17th October, Channel 4, 10.40pm
For documentary makers, bridging the gap between what is real and what we choose to know, often presents a challenge. However, using shock tactics to force awareness upon us can be counter-productive and result in us switching off completely.
The showing of shockingly graphic images of the bloodied remains of an aborted foetus in this documentary was of the "switch-off index" scale.
Unfortunately, it may be all that is remembered, rather than the important information provided on the latest medical advances that are affecting pre-term infant survival and our understanding of foetal pain.
These are the two key scientific issues likely to contribute to the forthcoming UK parliamentary debate on updating the current abortion laws there. Currently, abortions can be carried out up to 24 weeks, provided two doctors agree that continuing the pregnancy would damage the mother's physical or mental wellbeing.
This differs from most European countries where the time limit is 12 weeks, unless the foetus is severely disabled or the mother's life at risk.
Forty years ago, when abortion became legal in Britain, babies under 28 weeks rarely survived. In 1990, the time limit was lowered from 28 to 24 weeks.
Now medical advances, particularly the development of new drugs to inflate tiny lungs, means that babies born at 24 weeks have up to an 80 per cent survival rate.
This results in a bizarre dichotomy where in the same hospital a 24-week-old foetus may be aborted on one floor while on another floor, staff will be trying to save the life of a preterm baby born at 24 weeks' gestation.
In a poll, two thirds (65 per cent) of 1,000 registered British GPs thought the current 24-week time limit should be reduced.
On the topic of foetal pain, the conclusion of experts in the mid-1990s, that the foetus could not feel pain until 26 weeks' gestation, is now being challenged by new, scientifically controversial, research that suggests a foetus can feel pain as early as 20 weeks.
The emotiveness of this possibility was added to by the decision of a surgeon to depart from his usual sanitised explanation of what happens in a late abortion, to tell it as it is. His calm factual account of how the foetus is dismembered inside the uterus and pulled out, bit by bit, under the guidance of an ultrasound scan was devastating in its honesty.
After the initial shock of the graphic images and description, we were left, after this documentary, with the sense of the role language plays in our ability to see the same thing in different and sometimes incompatible ways, depending on our viewpoint. So we simultaneously had "the products of conception," the foetus, the preterm baby - and even the actual baby, Milly, born at 24 weeks' gestation.
This documentary will fuel the immensely emotional debate that is about to happen in Britain and no doubt also in this country.
Review by Olive Travers, clinical psychologist