|PIC1|MPs voted on Tuesday to keep the upper legal limit on abortion at 24 weeks, despite strong protests from Christians and pro-life campaigners seeking to protect the rights of the unborn child.

Parliament was gripped in three hours of passionate debate between supporters arguing in favour of a women's right to choose and opponents who defended the right of a foetus to live.

Health minister Dawn Primarolo argued in favour of the status quo, telling Parliament, "While there have been medical advances in caring for premature babies, only a small number born after 24 weeks gestation can survive."

Conservative MP and former nurse Nadine Dorries called for a 20-week limit, saying that it was morally wrong for babies to be terminated at 24 weeks when some babies were surviving birth at this stage in the pregnancy.

"I think there comes a point when it has to be said this baby has a right to life also," she told Parliament.

Outside Parliament, Christians and pro-life campaigners called for the limit to be lowered, whist women's rights campaigners protested for the 24-week limit to remain.

Andrea Minichiello Williams, of the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship, joined the protest.

"Whether or not you are a Christian, a child can survive at 22 weeks. How can we live in a civilised society and continue to abort up to 24 weeks when we know that babies are viable before that?" she said.

|PIC3|"It's not just about the life in the womb, it's about the women, the women who do not speak, who hold a secret and very often cannot speak about what it is that they have done.

"We need to blast open that veil and we need to help women talk about it and begin to see that there are alternative solutions in an unplanned pregnancy to abortion."

Ms Williams said that society had to do more to promote ethical alternatives to abortion, such as adoption, and provide the support that would help women to keep their child.

"We need a complete transformation of society for life, for goodness, for truth," she said.

Ms Williams urged Christians to continue campaigning for life, and called on church leaders to speak out on the issue.

"The Parliament has not listened, the MPs have not listened, and we need to begin to make them listen," she said.

"It's the beginning of the next campaign, to change the make up of Parliament, and bring in MPs like Nadine Dorries and Daniel Kawczynski who actually vote for life and for family, and yes, for cures and compassion and the things that really matter.

"Every church, whatever denomination, needs to speak the message of the times. And the message of the times is for the church leaders to call out their churches and to speak out on behalf of life not death, truth not falsehood."

Around 200,000 abortions were carried out in Britain in 2006, of which about 3,000 were conducted after 20 weeks -1.5 percent of the total.

|PIC2|Alan Craig, of the Christian People's Alliance, said, "The situation right now is intolerable for a humane, compassionate society...For us to slaughter so many unborn children at the rate they are being slaughtered is unacceptable.

"We live in a society that is almost honouring death. But how we treat our unborn, our children, our elderly is the sign of a civilised society. It's just being blind to say that foetuses are not children. It's sheer nonsense and I think it is desperately sad."

The abortion vote was the final contentious issue in an overhaul of fertility and embryology laws dating from 1990 being debated by Parliament.

Ade Omooba of Coherent and Cohesive Voice, was outside Parliament advocating for a complete ban on abortion, unless in exceptional circumstances.

"What are we saying to society? What are we saying to the young people? That life at the conceptual stages is nothing, you can just do away with it. At the moment, we use abortion as a form of contraception. It's become a lifestyle in this society."

He said that private sector clinics should follow NHS clinics and hospitals in only offering abortion up to 16 weeks.

"If the state hospitals will not allow abortion under 16 weeks, why should anyone else have it? Why should the private sector have it? The private sector is making money by distorting women's choice...Women's choice is just an angle for them to propagate their own exploitation."

Earlier, lawmakers voted to remove the need for a father for children created through IVF treatment.

Conservative lawmaker Iain Duncan Smith defended the need for a father, saying that the rights of a child had to come before the human rights of adults to have children.

The Bill, he argues, sent out the message that "fathers are less important than mothers".

On Monday, Parliament voted to allow the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos for scientific research and "saviour siblings" to be used as donors for their sick brothers and sisters.