The Abortion Bill
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From: Christopher Hollis, Mrs M. R. Vaughan, Mrs Anna Chaiaway, Colm Brogan, S. Brykczysiski, C. R. A. Swynnerton, David West, Dennis Austin, D. V. Tahmankar, Noel Barber, Dr Anthony Eisinger. J. A. Nelder.
Sut,—Emotive phrases such as 'abortion is murder' or on the other side 'every child has the right to be wanted' are not very helpful. The latter can have no weaning except that every mother who does not want a child has a right to have it killed. The Bishop of Exeter's middle view that the foetus has rights but that they are less than the rights of the born is surely sensible.
Catholic women would, of course, have every right to protest against a Bill which compelled them to submit to operations that were forbidden by their conscience, but of that there is no suggestion in Mr Steel's Bill. But it is not self-evident that the prin- ciple of the sanctity of human life implies that, where both cannot be saved, the mother should be sacrificed to the child. Many people of the highest integrity take the opposite view and the Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Liberty would not seem to allow a Catholic in a pluralist society to impose his views on this matter on the rest of society even if he had the power to do so. Nor in a society in which abortion is on occasion allowed can it be objection- able that a Bill should be passed to clarify a situation that is admittedly at the moment obscure.
But the pioposal that abortion should be allowed when 'the woman's capacity as a mother will be seri- ously overstrained by the care of the child' is another matter. After all, if a family really cannot accom- modate another child, adoption is always possible. There may be disadvantages for a child in being brought up in adoption but it is not self-evident that they are greater than the disadvantages of not exist- ing. I share with Dr John Rowan Wilson Medicine Today,' July 15) the hope that this provision will be dropped out of the Bill.
Everyone must agree on the evil of the 'back street' abortion and clearly it is most important that if operations of abortion are to be performed they should be performed by properly qualified doctors under proper conditions. But how far this Bill will remedy that evil will remain to be seen. A consider- able proportion of those who now undergo back street abortions are women to whom competent doctors would certainly have forbidden abortion on purely medical grounds and who would not qualify for" one under this Bill. The experience of Scan- dinavian countries shows that easier legal abortion by no means necessarily leads to less illegal abortion.
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