Sarah Palin is wrong about abortion

Sarah Palin, the Republican party's barn-storming pitbull with lipstick, owes a great deal of her popularity in conservative America to her attitude to abortion. She is not only against it in all circumstances; she has spectacularly proved she is.

Refusing to abort a foetus that she knew would be born with Down's syndrome - as a result her Down's baby Trig was born this April - and encouraging her pregnant 17-year old schoolgirl daughter Bristol to become a mother while still a minor have made Governor Palin a national heroine to the anti-abortion lobby.

She is no heroine to me. I cannot respect either decision, and prefer not to imagine the pressure that would have been put on Bristol had she wanted an abortion; it would have blasted her mother's political ambitions.

However, I do entirely respect both mother's and daughter's freedom to make their own decisions about their pregnancies. What angers me is the triumphalist congratulation that surrounds the Palins among anti-abortionists - in the US and in Britain - and the smug, un-self-critical assumption that they are absolutely right; everyone who thinks otherwise is absolutely wrong, and immoral and heartless as well.

There is another view, both heartfelt and moral, that it is wrong knowingly to bring into the world a very damaged baby, or to force a woman to do so. The life-long grief and difficulty it can cause for all concerned is a terrible thing, to say nothing of the cost; that may be tolerable in a rich family but in ordinary families the reality is very different.

A damaged child very often means the parents are locked into 24-hour care, into poverty, anxiety and, in the absence of extremely generous welfare payments, this is for life.

It happens that for personal reasons I have come to know a lot of people who were