WHY is the abortion time limit linked to the time when a premature baby could, with sufficient medical intervention, survive? I fail to see the relevance (Family planning is one area in which we don’t need MPs’ help, Simon Jenkins, Comment, and Don’t mess with abortion, Rachel Johnson, News Review, last week).

If one set of doctors do their utmost to help a much-wanted premature baby to survive, why does this affect the work of another set of doctors doing their utmost to help a woman who does not want the child?

Whether, and until what stage, a woman should be entitled to an abortion is, of course, a matter of opinion. But whether the child could survive should not be a consideration.

Sarah Plummer
Tadcaster, North Yorkshire

EMOTIONS AND THE LAW: Thank you Rachel Johnson for a sensible article on the vote to amend the Abortion Act. It is so rare to read a sentence like “But I am not a neonatologist”. Most people seem unable to separate their emotional response from the law.

Judith Dorr
Henley, Oxfordshire

SAVE THE CHILDREN: Jenkins’s approach is that a child is a commodity and, since there exist medical procedures to satisfy the desire for this commodity, there should be nothing to stop a woman obtaining one. He also implies that the state has no business to limit the desire to have a child or the desire to abort a child.

This is a serious and alarming principle. If the state has no business in interfering with family life – actions that affect no one outside the family – how would you deal with Josef Fritzl in Austria? Or the man or woman who kills a baby? Family matters must be the concern of the law.

The law exists surely to protect the vulnerable, and who is more vulnerable than an unborn child?

Mary Kilbride
Southampton

IN GOOD CONSCIENCE: I was surprised to hear that the MPs were “allowed to vote in accordance with their conscience” for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Shouldn’t they do this every time they vote?

Ray Traynor
Guildford, Surrey

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