Dani Garavelli: Abortion challenge puts us all in the dock YOU may not agree with the midwives who are challenging Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board's insistence that they should supervise staff involved in abortions, but you have to admire their guts. By sticking up for their oh-so-unfashionable beliefs they have exposed themselves to the kind of scorn that would make even professional contrarians a bit queasy. Since it emerged that Concepta Wood and Mary Doogan were taking their case to the Court of Session, they have been vilified by commentators so relentlessly secular or self-consciously liberal they cannot empathise with the difficult position the women find themselves in. On chat shows and online forums you encounter them, lambasting the midwives for their choice of profession. "If I was an animal rights activist, I wouldn't take a job in a slaughter house," they rail. The sustainability of such a comparison (if you look up midwifery under NHS careers there's no mention of abortion) goes unchallenged because these women are, as we are constantly reminded, "devout Catholics," and these days the religious are regarded as beneath contempt. In fact, though the women referred to their faith in their petition, abortion is more a moral than a religious issue. I mean, it's not like wearing a burka or not eating meat on a Friday - a convention you observe because clerics say you should. It's something pro-lifers, religious or otherwise, oppose because, like cheating or stealing, they believe it to be fundamentally wrong. Yet, even if you believe foetuses are just a bunch of cells right up to the current 24 week-limit, why would you dismiss the sincerely held concerns of those convinced they have intrinsic value? Have we really got to the stage where we sneer at people for refusing to compromise on their convictions just because they differ from our own? And what happens if one day our beliefs cease to be the prevailing ones? If liberals become as marginalised as the devoutly religious are today, will we just go with the flow, as they are being expected to do? Much as they abhor abortions, Concepta Wood and Mary Doogan are not trying to prevent them happening; they didn't take jobs at Glasgow's Southern General Hospital to sabotage the system or make a political statement. When they started work, they were told they need play no part in terminations. But a reorganisation led to abortion patients being cared for on the labour ward and they were told they would have to "supervise, delegate and support" staff involved in the procedure. They complained, but were overruled, hence the petition to the Court of Session. To some, the women's protest may seem a bit thrawn (they're not being asked to administer the drugs, after all) but for them, contributing to any stage of the process feels like collusion - a bit like opening the factory door so thieves can steal goods, or, as the Catholic Church is prone to put it, agreeing to drive the trains to Auschwitz. While I balk at the Holocaust analogy, it does serve as a reminder that just because something is legal it doesn't make it right, and we all have a duty to examine our consciences from time to time. Where I think the midwives would cross the line is if they refused to take part in aftercare. I raise this point because last week retired midwife Margaret Carroll said working in Greenock in the 70s, she encountered Catholic midwives who refused to bring so much as a cup of tea to abortion patients. To me, this seems to go against Christianity and common decency. Catholic parliamentary officer John Deighan went on to justify this position, claiming that providing aftercare allowed terminations to take place. But supporting a woman who may have made the hardest decision of her life is not, as he contends, like driving the getaway car after a burglary, it's more like tending a wound sustained in its commission. For me, no amount of moral opprobrium could justify walking away from someone in pain. Whether or not the midwives will win is anyone's guess; in 1988, GP's receptionist Barbara Janaway lost her claim for unfair dismissal for refusing to type an abortion referral letter on the grounds that it did not constitute "participation" in the actual procedure. But last year lawyers used the new Equality Act to persuade a London hospital to exempt two nurses from duty in an abortion clinic. Whatever the outcome, the midwives have raised an issue likely to become more pressing with each new medical advance. Today, opposition to abortion is a fringe activity. But what if other outlawed procedures were legalised; what if medical staff were suddenly required to participate in gender selection, cloning or euthanasia? Would those opposed to ending the lives of the terminally ill be forced to carry out assessments or prep drugs, their qualms dismissed as religious flim-flammery? It's worth thinking about. We don't know what ethical conundrums lie ahead in this brave new world of ours, but if in the future we run up against something which, though accepted by society at large, we feel with every fibre of our being to be wrong, it would be nice to think we'd at least be given a fair hearing.