Abortion - even 40 years after the passing of the Abortion Act - remains a subject which inspires such passion that few people attempt to negotiate a path between those who champion the rights of the unborn child and those who argue for women's right to terminate pregnancy.

The frontiers of social attitudes and medical abilities have changed since 1967, resulting in an increase in the number of very premature babies who survive, and also in the number of abortions. Later this month, the British Medical Association will debate the issue following a report from its medical ethics committee recommending that there should no longer be a requirement for two doctors to sign the consent form, and that nurses and midwives should be able to carry out abortions within the first 13 weeks of pregnancy.

On Monday, Lord Steel of Aikwood, who steered through the 1967 act, wrote in The Herald that he believed it had prevented the deaths of hundreds of women. "If termination of pregnancy has to happen it is better to be legal and safe than illegal and dangerous," he said. On the same day, an attempt to introduce compulsory counselling and a seven-day cooling-off period for women seeking abortions was defeated by MPs. This followed a sermon last month by Cardinal Keith O'Brien to mark the anniversary of the Abortion Act, in which he controversially likened the number of abortions in Scotland (13,081 in 2006) to "two Dunblane massacres a day".

The comparison was a modernised version of one made in 1997 by the late Cardinal Thomas Winning, when he said the number of abortions in Britain was the equivalent of two Lockerbie air crashes a day. At the same time, he announced an initiative to help women facing an unwanted pregnancy to go to the Archdiocese of Glasgow for assistance. It generated considerable controversy about women being "bribed" to give birth.

For the past 10 years, Sister Roseann Reddy of the Sisters of the Gospel of Life, a Glasgow-based order founded for the purpose, has run the Winning Pro-life Initiative. "The very fact we have been here for 10 years means we must be doing something right," she says. "I am not forcing women to see us. I am not advertising greatly. Often the first thing most say to us is, I'm not a Catholic.' I don't care."

A veteran of the abortion debate, she says that, 40 years on, we are still not addressing the issues properly. "If the number of abortions is increasing, either there are more reasons women feel compelled to choose something everyone says is not a good thing, or it is because we have so dehumanised children and women."

The changes over 10 years include the shift from surgical to medical abortions, where pregnancies of less than 10 weeks are terminated by taking a pill administered in hospital. She cites the difference between "having an abortion done to you" and actively taking a pill as an important factor in post-abortion mental illness. "There are a whole lot of subtle things like that in the abortion debate, which is why we do really need to think about it 40 years on. It is very difficult for most women to go through with abortion, even if some do it more easily than others."


Increasingly, she is working with women who have previously had abortions and want to unburden themselves. "People say that women who have abortions only feel guilty because of pro-lifers like me making them feel guilty. I've never made anyone feel guilty in 25 years and I don't have the capacity to do that, but I deal with a lot of women whose guilt comes from knowing that they made the decision to end the life of their child. Part of their difficulty is that they are not even allowed to express it. For all the screaming and shouting about abortion, it is still a very silent thing.

"I've never met a woman - or anyone - who likes abortion, yet it seems to be such a common thing. Abortion is only a controversial issue because it is the taking of a human life. Everyone knows it's a human life, whether you call it a foetus, an embryo or a blob of jelly, but our society wants instant solutions."

Supporters of women's choice find the Catholic Church's uncompromising stance that abortion is always wrong difficult, yet each side would argue that it is supportive of women facing a difficult choice. "It all comes back to being women's fault'," says Sister Roseann. "In the 21st century that is quite astonishing, and it is the result of not dealing with the issue head-on."

She claims that none of the 2300 women who have asked for help from her project has not known about contraception. "Even 12-year-olds know about condoms," she says. But she argues that we have failed a generation of young people. "We have girls who are pregnant and cannot remember having sex, girls who do not know the surname of their partner. Women come and tell me they don't know how they got pregnant. Well, I'm a nun and I know how they got pregnant."


To the argument that the continuing benefit of the Abortion Act is the ending of illegal abortions, she says: "Does anyone really think that women would have gin baths and stick knitting needles up themselves and go on having illegal abortions now? Why is having a baby such a crisis that women would do that?

"A lot of women have abortions for other people's reasons: because the partner will leave them, the parents think she will ruin her life, or she can't afford it because she is on a short-term contract and has to pay a mortgage. There are real pressures and the first thing we do is take these seriously. That helps, because there is an attitude which says people should not be getting pregnant when contraception is freely available.

"The youngest we have ever dealt with was 12 and the oldest 49. You do get the girls who come and all they need is literally a cot and a pram. The commonest thing is for them to say they have thought about an abortion but could not go through with it. As part of the crisis pregnancy care, we would go on to help them.

"Then there are those who are incredibly confused and have no idea what to do. We get them to sit down and look at it realistically. The very fact we exist is a recognition that there is such a thing as a crisis pregnancy, and that also means they are not alone in the situation."

Ten years of dealing with desperate women has convinced Roseann Reddy that the initial criticism of the scheme - that it would not provide support for all the years of bringing up a child - missed the point. "These women don't want to keep in touch with us, because we were there when they were seriously thinking about not having this baby. When that baby is born, everything does change.

"When we visit the mums, they have this funny thing they all do. They say, When I look at her now ' or When I think about it ' but they never complete the sentence. They don't need to. I know they've been to hell and back. I know they've made a lot of sacrifices, as women have constantly done for their children and constantly will do.

"Once they've made their decision, most people just get on with their lives. I'm not going to force my help on people who don't need it, but the fact we are there and have been there gives them a bit of confidence and support, and that makes a remarkable difference."