Abortion now seen as an easy option, warns Archbishop

Stepping into the increasingly volatile debate on terminations and time limits, Dr Rowan Williams suggested that Britons risk losing sight of the sanctity of life.

MPs, doctors and pro-life campaigners welcomed the intervention, saying the harrowing procedure risked being viewed as nothing more than an alternative to contraception.

The Archbishop's entry into the debate comes as new figures reveal the scale of abortions carried out for minor, treatable birth defects.

In one area of England alone, more than 50 babies with club feet and 37 with cleft lips or palates were aborted in three years, raising fears that the procedure is being used to satisfy parents' desire for the perfect baby.

The Archbishop said that abortion, legalised 40 years ago to provide an option for women in extreme circumstances, was now commonplace.

He said: "Many supporters of the 1967 Act started from a strong sense of taking for granted the wrongness of ending an unborn life.

"What people might now call their 'default position' was still that abortion was a profoundly undesirable thing and that a universal presumption of care for the foetus from the moment of conception was the norm.

There has been an obvious weakening of the feeling that abortion is a last resort in cases of extreme danger or distress.

"Nearly 200,000 abortions a year in England and Wales tell their own story. We are not now dealing with a relatively small number of extreme cases."

The intervention by the Archbishop, the spiritual leader to some 70million Anglicans around the world, comes as an influential committee of MPs discusses whether the 24-week cut-off point for abortions for so- called 'social reasons' should be lowered.

The Commons science and technology committee is also examining whether it should be made easier for women to abort a baby in the first weeks of pregnancy by allowing nurses to carry out the procedure or permitting home abortions for those in the earliest stages.

Dr Williams also suggested that the present 24-week limit for abortions - set in 1990 when babies born at 23 weeks and younger had little chance of survival - should be reviewed in light of the growing survival of very premature babies.

"This issue needs attention if only because of the fact that the existing law assumes a rather less developed state of medical science than is now the case," he wrote in an article for the Observer.

He added: "Recent discussion on making it easier for women to administer abortioninducing drugs at home underlines the growing belief that abortion is essentially an individual decision and not the kind of major moral choice that should involve a sharing of perspective and judgment.

"The pregnant woman who smokes or drinks heavily is widely regarded as guilty of infringing the rights of her unborn child.

"Yet at the same time, with no apparent sense of incongruity, there is discussion of the possibility of the liberty of the pregnant woman herself to perform the actions that will terminate a pregnancy."

Latest figures from the South West Congenital Anomaly Register, which details rates of birth defects in counties from Cornwall to Wiltshire, show that 54 babies with club feet and 26 with extra or webbed fingers or toes were aborted during a three-year period.

In addition, 37 babies with cleft lips or palates were aborted between 2002 and 2005.

With many of the problems often easily corrected by a simple operation, the revelation has raised concerns that the babies are being aborted for not being perfect.

However, Tim Overton, a consultant in foetal medicine at St Michael's Hospital in Bristol, said he doubted whether any of the abortions were carried out for purely cosmetic reasons.

This issue won't go away, says curate campaigner

Joanna Jepson was born with a congenital jaw defect and has a brother with Down's syndrome.

The curate became a focus for concerns about abortion law when she instigated a legal challenge against West Mercia police for failing to prosecute doctors who carried out an abortion on a baby with a cleft palate at 28 weeks - four weeks after the usual legal limit.

Miss Jepson, whose jaw defect was corrected by surgery, claimed the law was broken because abortions can be carried out after 24 weeks only if the infant has a 'serious handicap' or the mother's health is at risk.

She took the case to the High Court and won a judicial review of the chief constable's original decision to take no action against the doctors who carried out the abortion at Hereford County Hospital in 2001.

In 2005 the Crown Prosecution Service announced that no charges would be brought against the doctors.

However, the case fuelled growing concern over terminations for minor disabilities and the wider debate over the abortion limit.

Miss Jepson said yesterday: "No matter how much the Government seeks to avoid the debate on abortion, the issue will not go away. From the recent figures it is evident that the Abortion Act is being massively abused."