SIR,—It seems to me that Mr Quentin de la Bedoyere
deceives himself with his own jargon. Of course abor- tion is not murder, because the non-viable foetus is not a human being. It is only a potential human being, and meanwhile, has a 15-20 per cent chance of being spontaneously aborted by Act of God. Admittedly it is not so dramatic to talk about 'ter- minating the existence of the non-viable foetus' as it is to chant 'abortion is murder,' but as Mr de Ia Bedoyere now admits, however you decide to describe it, thousands of women do it each year, legally and illegally.
I can't pretend to follow Mr de Ia Bedoyere's statistics, but I take it that what surprises him is that so feW women actually die of abortion in this country each year. (Though twenty-four to thirty totally un- necessary deaths of innocent women is hardly to be sneezed at, I would have thought.) The comparatively low death rate is due to the introduction of anti- ' biotics in hospitals. Before this. before the war, as many as 600 women died from this cause in a single year. What Mr de la Bedoyere has left out of account is the problem of ill-health following inexpertly per- formed criminal abortion. This is in fact a major problem of social medicine in our society, even though few people have the courage to speak out about it.
There are no accurate statistics on this problem, but we can gain some glimpse of the dimension of the problem from the exchange that took place be-
tween Mrs Renee Short, MP, and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance on July 12 last year. She asked how many working days were lost because of abortion each year. Mr Norman Pentland replied that the 'total number of days of incapacity certified on claims for benefit as due to abortion' varied from 249,000 to 354,000 a year during the past five years. 'Mrs Short said these figures did not represent the whole position. Many doctors did not give abortion as a reason for a woman's disability because of the legal implications and the complications likely to occur. Mr Pentland said these statistics had been obtained from an analysis of the descriptions of causes of incapacity entered on medical certificates by medical practi- tioners. . . .' (British Medical Journal, August 7, 1965.)
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