The House of Lords is to debate abortion for disability, after a Tory peer introduced a Bill on the subject. Lord Shinkwin’s Abortion (Disability Equality) Bill was given its first reading last week. Introducing the Private Member’s Bill, Lord Shinkwin said: “Discrimination on the grounds of disability after birth is outlawed. Yet today legal and lethal discrimination on the grounds of disability is allowed up to birth by law.” The 1967 Abortion Act made abortion legal at any stage, as long as two doctors give the opinion “that there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped”. Lord Shinkwin’s Bill proposes to strike that condition from abortion law, so that the law would no longer make a reference to disability. Last year, 3,213 unborn children were aborted under the disability clause in England and Wales.