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Letter to the editor

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Your campaign against abortion is misplaced. Not everyone regards abortion as immoral. Unpleasant, but not immoral. I could argue that the reason we outlaw murder is that we wish to live without the climate of fear that it instills.

Death itself cannot be regarded as immoral because it comes to us all in the end. But the foetus is no more aware of its existence and therefore capable of such fear than the unfertilised egg that nature routinely aborts as part of the menstrual cycle. So where's the problem with abortion on demand? To reduce the legal period would introduce an unnecessary element of rush into a most difficult decision.

We are dealing with a subjective value judgment upon which people will always differ. Your desire to impose uniformity across society, even with majority support (oppressive democracy), contravenes Edmund Burke's famous free society principle, which forms one of the central pillars of modern Conservative philosophy, and which you were quick enough to invoke during the fox hunting debate. Are you an authoritarian or a libertarian? You cannot have it both ways.

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