Abortion boom
Sir: Marie Vaughan (Letters, 28 March) and R. J. Aspinall (Letters, 4 April) think that most women will prefer, given the choice, to get an abortion from a qualified doctor rather than from a back-street abortionist. This may seem a logical point of view but it is just not the experience of countries that have made abortion legal. In 1966 the Council of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists unani- mously adopted a report in which it was stated that in Japan during the years immediately following legislation of abortion on socio- economic as well as on medical grounds it is reckoned that when the number of legal abor- tions rose to one million per annum the number of illegal abortions was also one million per annum. Reformers may want to abolish this dividing line, but patients, whether for reasons of secrecy or shame, evidently do not.
Your readers may be alarmed at Marie Vaughan's suggestion that the legal right to destroy unborn life should be seen merely as a form of birth control and is thus a by-product 0:1 of the equality of women. This rather Hitlerian concept might as easily be embraced in support of euthanasia. Why shouldn't a middle-aged woman rid herself of a helpless, burdensome parent? But did not a Euthanasia Bill follow in the wake of the Abortion Act?
Adrian Fitzgerald Flat 127, Swan Court, Flood Street, London SW3
Previous page
