Pause to consider what home abortions entail

SIR – Before we welcome the Government’s impending decision to allow women to administer the abortion pill to themselves at home (report, August 25), we should consider three things.

First, when women take that drug, they deliberately and directly kill their own offspring. Yes, some may already be doing so (under nurses’ supervision) in hospital wards or abortion clinics. But to do it deliberately and alone in the intimacy of their homes, where those children may have been conceived and where they would have grown up (and probably been much loved), has a special repugnance.

Secondly, unless the “products of conception” (as they are conveniently called) are collected and incinerated by the abortion clinics or hospitals which supplied the lethal pills, the mothers have to throw those “products” into the dustbin or down the lavatory – surely something that could haunt, if not traumatise, any woman.

Thirdly, when those “products” are thrown down the lavatory, they enter our domestic water system. Yes, these, together with other human refuse, will be removed at sewage stations; but if the poisoned bodies of hundreds, maybe thousands, of pre-born children have come into the system, shall (or should) we not shudder a little when we turn on our taps?

Professor Jack Scarisbrick Emeritus National Chairman of Life Leamington Spa, Warwickshire