Ethics of abortion
Sir: Diane Munday of BPAS. (19 November) considers that all that is needed in a decision on abortion is 'counselling (by lay helpers) to help clients discover what they really feel and what they really want'. David Steele's 1967 Abortion Act does not legalise this practice but requires two doctors in good faith to determine if it is in the patient's best interests that the pregnancy should continue or not. In practice a BPAS client has a 96 per cent chance of an abortion so that BPAS is suspect. Moreover, since well over half England's abortions are arranged privately this sector must claim around threequarters of a million abortions since 1967.
Are there other 'interested parties' who should as it were have a vote? If the fetus has a potential life of seventy-five years should we allow him say five votes — always against his own death? The mother might have three votes, the father one, but the rest of us grandparents, the community or state (The Law) — should they have a vote? After ten years of the 1967 Act surely there is a case for replacing all private lay counsellors with NHS committees — stipendiary and available seven days a week. There would necessarily be a gynaecologist to advise on the strictly medical implications of a decision and an experienced general practitioner, preferably a woman. The patient might then consider the alternative put to her in a kindly fashion and she should be given time to think — perhaps a statutory week. She (and even more important the father) would then be given the facts and weigh delivery against the risks of the termination itself both in the theatre and months or years later: for example sterility, recurrent involuntary abortions at twentyfour weeks. At the moment there are resources in the NHS and voluntary societies such as 'Life' and 'Life Line', but help in cash and housing is still inadequate for the single parent family.
Surely lay counsellors with a record of failing to arrange anything but an abortion cannot continue to be acceptable in weighing the pros and cons of abortion. Even if an Abortion Committee sounds rather cumbersome we are, after all, considering the fate of an unborn child however much the mother, driven to reject her pregnancy, deserves our compassion. H.C. McLaren, Lawson Tait Professor of Obstetrics Birmingham & Midland Hospital for Women.
Birmingham. 11.
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