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Archbishop urges re-think on abortion

Abortion is becoming commonplace and people are insufficiently troubled about terminating pregnancies, the Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday.

  • Reuters
  • Published: 23:04 October 21, 2007
  • Gulf News

London: Abortion is becoming commonplace and people are insufficiently troubled about terminating pregnancies, the Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday.

Writing on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Britain's Abortion Act, which legalised the procedure, the spiritual head of the world's 77 million Anglicans said people needed to think harder about the consequences of their actions.

"Recent discussion on making it simpler for women to administer abortion-inducing drugs at home underlines the growing belief that abortion is essentially a matter of individual decision and not the kind of major moral choice that should involve a sharing of perspective and judgment," Rowan Williams wrote in an article published in the Observer newspaper.

"Something has happened to our assumptions about the life of the unborn child."

Survey

There were nearly 200,000 abortions in England and Wales in 2005, according to the Department of Health, and a recent survey by the medical journal Lancet reported that one-third of pregnancies in Europe end in abortion.

The archbishop made no direct call for legislation to be tightened, but he pointed out the paradox he saw between those who campaign for greater "foetal rights", condemning women who smoke during pregnancy, but fail to speak out about abortion.

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