HOW satisfying their 40-day prayer vigil outside an abortion clinic must have been for those high-principled Birmingham rosary-rattlers.

There they stood, outside Edgbaston’s Calthorpe Clinic, God on their side as they bullied women at their most vulnerable.

If the picket acted as usual, women would have been told that proceeding with terminations meant they were committing murders. Would be psychologically damaged for life by this crime.

At which point these deeply religious and righteous anti-abortionists would have whipped out lurid pictures of dead foetuses.

They told reporters covering their “40 days For Life” campaign that it started in America to offer women a realistic alternative to abortion.

What they wouldn’t have mentioned is that American anti-abortion fundamentalists have killed both doctors and nurses staffing abortion clinics. America, our protesters know full well, is hardly the place from which to seek inspiration in their fight against abortion, legal in Britain since the late 60s.

But the row rumbles on. Yes, it’s appalling that 200,000 foetuses – a number unthought of when the Abortion Act was passed – are killed each year in Britain.

Yes, the antis had cause for outrage in September when Cameron funked over an amendment to provide independent abortion counselling for women: right now the only recognised counselling comes from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and Marie Stopes International, both of which are unopposed to abortion.

In all honesty, though, that Arthur Road picket isn’t interested in the finer points of the thrown-out amendment. They want the Abortion Act repealed.

Then we would return to the days of those Vera Drake backstreet “helpers”, who left many women to bleed to death or die with septicaemia.

And, I’m sorry to say, most, if not all, are Catholics who take the “thou shalt not kill” commandment as their platform.

That is a dangerous and uncharitable position, as I learned as a reporter on one of my first assignments for this newspaper.

This took me to a Nazareth House convent where I saw, among other children, a heavily pregnant ten-year-old Indian girl, who had been raped by her lunatic brother. Her bewildered parents had asked these nuns for help. The notion of abortion wouldn’t have crossed their minds.

And I, seeing her baby-face and bright eyes above that bulging belly, could have wept. Who in their right mind would allow such a little girl to go through the discomfort of pregnancy, the pain of childbirth?

From that day on, I’ve been convinced that although abortion is always sad, it cannot be withheld on a legal or religious tenet.

Especially – and this must be said – as the Catholic Church is now seen throughout the world as both unable and unwilling to cope with other aspects of sexuality.

The problem with anti-abortionists is that they drift into zealotry, develop tunnel vision. They are obdurate in the unbending adherence to that commandment not to kill. The same men and women, of course, would see no conflict between this belief and the fact that they’d pray for their sons and daughters were these posted with the army to Afghanistan on a mission to kill Taliban.