People in Britain are insufficiently troubled about terminating pregnancies, the Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday.
Writing on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Abortion Act, which legalised the procedure, Archbishop Rowan Williams, 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," Dr Williams wrote in an article published in the
Observer.
"Something has happened to our assumptions about the life of the unborn child."
There were nearly 200,000 abortions in England and Wales in 2005, according to Britain's Department of Health, and a recent survey by the medical journal
Lancetreported that one-third of pregnancies in Europe ends in abortion.
There have been calls for the upper time limit on abortions to be shortened from 24 weeks to 21 weeks, but a recent parliamentary bill on the matter was defeated.
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.
Britain has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in Europe, and many of those pregnancies end in abortion.