Letter: Dealing with the ugly truth of abortion

Sir: I'm a 32-year-old feminist anti-abortionist. There are many, many women like me, but we are mostly cowards. We don't speak out at dinner parties, or in the office, or at the toddler group, because who can say who we may be hurting? Most of my age group have been close to an abortion, in one way or another. Many of us are finding current grim revelations about the "partial birth" method of abortion painful (comment, 18 July).

There are times when otherwise civilised societies suffer from moral convulsions, when decent people fall prey to a shared moral blindness. In my lifetime, roughly the 30 years since David Steel's Abortion Act, an almost complete reversal of medical ethics has turned child killing into a minor procedure, and euphemisms like "termination" and "uterine contents" have protected us from the knowledge of what we are doing. We have declared that the unborn are not human, and the assertion has comforted us.

But we know more now. Every woman who has gazed at the scan photograph of her unborn child knows more than her mother did. Should we be surprised that recent medical research "strongly suggests" that the foetus feels the pain of having his or her brains sucked out, of being vacuumed into small pieces? We've left it to doctors and nurses to deal with knowledge like that.

It is unjust to leave women and health professionals to deal with the ugly truth of abortion. We condoned and financed 184,000 such private tragedies last year when we paid our taxes. It is painful to read about foetal suffering, but we need to make a responsible, not a knee-jerk decision about the future. If every child must be a wanted child, what do we do with the unwanted? If we conclude that we must kill them, can medicine at least help us to do it humanely?

CRESSIDA EASTWELL

Bewdley, Worcestershire