It makes sense to have second thoughts

V ery few of us, male or female, have an altogether easy conscience about abortion. Indeed all too many of us have reason to feel painfully guilty.

That, however, is progress, since not so long ago it seemed as if Britain was sliding, without a qualm of conscience, into a condition little short of abortion on demand. No longer. Lord Steel, whose Bill it was that started the slide, last week called for second thoughts, not about the rightness of putting an end to back-street abortions - the original target of the legislation - but about the long-term decline in the sanctity of life to which this well- meaning reform gave rise.

Last week's decision not to go ahead with a ban on slapping children in the home is another example of this current new recognition that permissiveness has got quite out of hand. For it can

Conservative resistance to reform is not just fuddy-duddy stick-in-the-mudness

safely be assumed that those in the 1960s who sensibly voted to abolish flogging in the school never remotely imagined that this should lead, 40-odd years on, to the banning of slapping in the home.

Something of the same goes for immigration. Those who welcomed a trickle in the 1960s had no idea that this would soon lead to a flood.

Likewise with homosexuality. Of course it was right to decriminalise homosexuality, but did anybody suppose for a moment that by doing so this would lead, for heaven's sake, to homosexual civil marriages?

As a conservative I tend to welcome these second thoughts. For what they show is that conservative resistance to reform is not just fuddy-duddy, stick-in-the-mudness, but rather a clear understanding that liberty can so easily lead to licence, order to disorder. In other words, the road to hell really is paved with good intentions.