The rumour is that emergency legislation has already been drawn up

Their suspicion is that that is exactly what the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children want to achieve.

Not so, said the society's counsel on the first morning of the case.

Specific answer needed

Richard Gordon QC was quite insistent that what they wanted was an answer to a specific question.

Is the supply and administration of emergency contraception an offence under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act?

If it is, then the Health Secretary's decision to allow women to purchase the morning after pill over the counter from chemists without seeing their doctor first was unlawful, as it created a situation where both parties broke the 1861 law.

That might seem straightforward, but it is not.

The first problem for the court to consider was not just what was said in the 1861 Act, but what it meant.

To paraphrase, the Act says that a woman who is with child who tries to procure a miscarriage with poison or some other instrument is committing an offence.

It is also an offence for anyone else to attempt to procure a miscarriage by giving a woman poison etc whether or not she's with child.

Crucial words

The first stumbling block was the word 'miscarriage'.

Should the court try to work out what the 19th century medical definition of the term was?

Or was that irrelevant? Would Victorian Parliamentarians have known the precise definition, or would they have used the word as the man in the street would have understood it?

If that's the case how do you define what that Victorian man in the street understood the word to mean - and in any case as the Act is still on the statute book, should we update the meaning according to the common understanding now?

Horribly complicated, and bitterly disputed by both sides, the SPUC insisting that miscarriage was any termination of pregnancy from the point of fertilisation, the Department of Health and the Family Planning Association opting for a different definition.

They argued that pregnancy began at the point where the embryo was implanted in the womb.

IVF comparison

They used the example of IVF treatment to back up their assertion. When an egg is fertilised in a petri dish, does anyone believe a woman is pregnant at that point, or when the embryo is successfully implanted in the womb?

And so it went on.

Victorian medical textbooks were produced and examined.

Modern medical dictionaries were quoted by both sides as evidence to back up their definition of pregnancy. Unsurprisingly there was little agreement between them.

Why does it take a challenge by anti-abortionists to force ministers to even consider updating the law?

At times it felt like a history lesson, at others A-Level Biology class.

The arguments deepened in complexity for three days.

Now it is for the judge to decide whose was the most compelling argument. He's already warned it will take him several weeks.

But why is it that a judge in the 21st century is asked to base a decision which has the potential to affect thousands of women in the UK on an interpretation of a law made 141 years ago?

The government has asked to see his decision five days before its made public in order to address any public policy implications.

Emergency legislation

The rumour is that emergency legislation has already been drawn up to rectify the completely unworkable situation which will occur if all contraception is outlawed.

Why does it take a challenge by anti-abortionists to force ministers to even consider updating the law which has the potential, as this week's case has shown, to have such an impact on modern social practices?

And if they win, how likely is it that they won't bother to address the issue after all.

Family Planning Groups point to the significant advances in gay rights that have been brought in by Labour since 1997. They want to know when women's reproductive rights will receive the same attention.