There is a suggestion doing the rounds that Maria Hutchings, the Tory candidate in the Eastleigh by-election, holds even more extreme views on abortion than Nadine Dorries:

The Conservatives’ candidate in the Eastleigh by-election has even more extreme views on abortion than Nadine Dorries, it has emerged. Maria Hutchings told an interviewer that she wants to see the legal limit for terminations slashed to “ten weeks”:

“I am a pro-lifer and would have voted to reduce it as far as possible.”

Contrast this with Dorries position, which was to run a ”realist” campaign for to reduce the limit from 24 to 20 weeks. But even Dorries dream statute of 12 weeks is longer than Hutchings’.

Dorries told Mehdi Hasan:

“If anybody else wants to take the vote down to 20 weeks, I’m very happy to hand the baton over. It will not be me who takes a vote down to 12 weeks. My campaign is for 24 [down] to 20.”

Oh rilly?

Contrast both statements with what Dorries had to say in comment under one of her own articles, published by The Spectator in 2007:

“I would settle for the European average of 13 weeks, but would prefer 9.”

Dorries, who periodically trades on having been once a nurse – thirty years ago – is also rather shaky in her knowledge of human biology.

An embryo’s heart will actually have developed sufficiently to start beating at around 18-21 days after fertilisation, i.e. by the end of the first week of the pregnancy – a pregnancy is not deemed to have begun until the embryo has successfully implanted in its mother’s womb which, in humans, occurs around 14 days after fertilisation.

However, a foetal heartbeat cannot currently be detected in the womb, using ultrasound, until around 5-6 weeks gestation, which is still several weeks earlier than ‘Nurse’ Dorries suggested back in 2007.

Sorry folks but you’ve forgotten the golden rule – Nadine lies.