Abortion: A decision that doesn't serve the public interest The decision of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) not to prosecute two abortion doctors who allegedly broke the law by offering gender-specific terminations raises a host of questions that need urgently to be answered. The apparent abuses were exposed by a Daily Telegraph undercover investigation into suggestions that clinics were prepared to offer "sex-selection" abortions to women who were carrying girl foetuses. After an 18-month police investigation, the CPS agreed there was sufficient evidence to bring charges and a realistic chance of securing a conviction. However, they decided not to proceed on "public interest" grounds. It is a long-established convention that the CPS can discontinue a criminal action if it is deemed to be against the public interest. The reasons for doing so usually involve cases in which a suspect is mentally ill or where national secrets may be exposed or a prosecution is deemed disproportionate to the crime committed. In the two cases under investigation, none of these considerations applies. The CPS said that one "highly relevant factor" was that the General Medical Council, the professional body, was carrying out its own inquiries and had powers to discipline the doctors concerned. This, it appears, is the principal reason why the CPS has decided not to go ahead with a trial. By no stretch of the imagination does that constitute the "public interest" as most people understand it. Why does the fact that the GMC is looking into the matter prevent the law being upheld? It is hard not to conclude, as Fraser Nelson observes opposite, that there is a reluctance to confront either the abuse of the abortion laws or the ethnic dimension to gender-specific terminations. Everyone knows that the law is already widely flouted; but that is no reason to water it down further. And as to whether terminations are taking place because mothers do not want girls, other countries manage to discuss this subject in a mature way; yet here even the official data is suppressed. If this prosecution has been dropped for political reasons, then Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, needs to say so. It is not for the CPS to decide that some laws can be broken because it might be socially and culturally difficult to uphold them - or, as Lord Macdonald, a former DPP said, to protect professionals from prosecution. The consequences here are far-reaching: the British Pregnancy Advisory Service is of the view that it has effectively legalised gender-specific abortion - a clearly unacceptable state of affairs without recourse to Parliament. Mr Starmer has promised to explain why this prosecution was halted. It is in the public interest that he does so as soon as possible.