In next Wednesday's Dispatches programme on Channel 4 we reveal the deep concern among many doctors who, like Dr Argent, work within the abortion service and are passionate supporters of a woman's right to choose, yet who still believe the current law urgently needs changing.
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Dr Spencer opens a fresh pack of shiny instruments. He's an extremely calm, softly spoken man, which somehow makes his words all the more devastating. "The foetus can't come out in one go. We haven't dilated sufficiently for that. The foetal parts are soft enough to break apart as they are being removed..."
In other words, he has to dismember the foetus inside the uterus and pull it out, bit by bit. He uses an ultrasound scan to guide him. Even then, some body parts are too large to come out intact.
To illustrate what happens, Dr Spencer grips his thumb between the surgical forceps and squeezes gently. "Those parts are the skull and then the spine and pelvis, and in fact they are crushed..."
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Already many local NHS trusts don't have any staff who are willing to perform abortions much beyond 12 weeks of pregnancy.
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Dr Kate Guthrie is a senior member of the RCOG. She also runs the NHS abortion service in Hull, where she operates on patients who are up to 14 weeks pregnant.
She'd be willing to retrain for the more complicated later procedure, but she wouldn't operate beyond 20 weeks. "I think every individual has their cut-off point. It's not scientific, it's just personal, it's just foetal size."
When I press her to spell out whether she means if the foetus is just "too much of a baby", she says: "I suppose so."
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n the mid-Nineties, partly in response to growing public concern about such issues, the RCOG put together a panel of experts who came to the reassuring conclusion that the foetus couldn't feel pain until 26 weeks gestation - safely beyond the abortion time limit.
They said the part of the brain that responds to pain simply isn't developed at 26 weeks. In other words, any physical movements the foetus displays before then are purely reflex actions - the foetus is not aware and can't feel anything.
But we found disturbing research in America that directly contradicts this established view. It came from Dr Sunny Anand, who has a distinguished record in helping to prove that very young babies can feel pain. When he was based at Oxford University in the 1980s his work helped to ensure that newborn babies were routinely given pain relief for surgical procedures.
His latest research is extremely technical and covers two areas. First, he's been comparing how newborn babies and unborn foetuses react to any kind of stress, including pain.
He's found similar changes in their hormones and their blood flow, suggesting that foetuses can indeed respond to pain.
Secondly, he's been researching - using rats - exactly which parts of the developing brain are used to detect pain.
He says that while the adult uses the very top section of the brain, the foetus has the first flickerings of sensation in the area below that. Crucially, this part of the brain develops before 26 weeks.
His conclusions could have enormous consequences for the abortion debate. He told Dispatches: "I believe that foetuses can feel pain very likely by 20 weeks of gestation and possibly even earlier."
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Back in July, we filmed a newborn baby named Hope in the neo-natal intensive care unit of Liverpool Women's Hospital. In her incubator, Hope was almost invisible under a pink blanket, surrounded by wires and bleeping monitors.
She had been born at 23 weeks - one week before she could have still been legally aborted. And here she was, three weeks later, still clinging to life with the frailest of grips.
Hope lived for two months, with her parents constantly at her side, before she died. In Britain, modern drugs and high-tech treatment meant she had about a 25 per cent chance of survival - hich would have doubled if she'd been born a week later. The odds were against her from the outset.
But those statistics are changing all the time. In America the chances of her survival would have been better, and what happens over there will inevitably filter through to Britain.
At a specialist unit in Arkansas, we filmed Dr Whit Hall checking on his tiny patients. "The survival is as high as 75 to 80 per cent for 24-weekers and about 50 per cent for 23-weekers," he explained.
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