Sir: The figure of eighteen foreign women aborted 'presumably as
private patients' in NHS hospitals during the first four -months of the Abortion Act, quoted by Mrs Madeleine Simms (Letters, 21 March), is really not relevant to estimating the number of visitors from abroad coming to Britain for abortions which would be illegal in their own countries, since the over- whelming majority of these are procured in 'Approved Places' (i.e. private nursing homes) and not under the ruts at all.
It is more significant that in the nine weeks
27 April-2 July 1968, out of 1,658 legal abor- tions in 'Approved Places' in England and Wales no less than 1,563 (94.2 per cent) were done in the London North West Metropolitan Hospital Region. Presumably most of these were visitors to London, but there is no way of knowing how many had come from abroad though estimates (guesses is perhaps a better word) have been published suggesting an an- nual rate of over 5,000.
One wonders whether the fairly extensive inquiries into patients' medical and social his- tories, which most doctors would consider necessary before an abortion is certified as legal under the Act, are always made in these cases. They must surely be more difficult with foreign patients, though one London prac- titioner was quoted last summer in a German mass-circulation magazine as saying that 'if a woman comes to me she has already made her own decision, and I can in principle only say yes to it.'
It would be easy enough to amend the Abor- tion Regulations 1968 to require the patients' nationality and normal place of residence to be recorded, and it is to be hoped that this will soon be done to provide reliable statistics on what may be quite an important problem.
C. B. Goodhart Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
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