Mal Fletcher comments

The pro-abortion-on-demand stance is an important one to several groups of people. First of all, to those women who might not want a baby or who feel emotionally or financially ill-equipped for motherhood.

I seriously doubt that any caring person would want to see a return to the days when single mothers were ostracised and condemned by society at large. People of faith will certainly agree, as it was Christ who taught us to love the marginalised and the hurting.

This love must be more than an intellectual assent to the idea of caring - it must involve practical assistance. But showing compassion does not mean staying silent when speaking up might save someone from wrongdoing and pain. There is such a thing as 'speaking the truth in love'.

The pro-abortion-on-demand position is also important to radical women's rights movements. Such organisations have consistently maintained that abortion is an issue of women's rights. When a human embryo is growing inside a woman's body, they say, it is her 'property' and she has the right to do with it whatever she pleases.

While purportedly setting out to change community attitudes towards women, some of these groups have shut many women out of their work, by solely representing fringe interests.

As is often the case, these liberal radicals are quick to pigeonhole those who don't completely agree with their agenda. They seek to demonize their opponents, saying that those who would reappraise abortion-on-demand are 'anti-women'.

In actual fact, there is good evidence to show that being anti-abortion may in many cases be the more pro-woman stance.

Pro-abortionists like to talk about freedom of choice, but they rarely tell the truth about the after-affects of abortion: either the physical complications that can arise, or the mother's sense of emotional loss and grief which can take many years to come to terms with.

Thank God, the message of Christianity is that through Christ even that pain can be healed over time - though the memory doubtless remains, with support and love people can be given closure.

Pro-abortion-on-demand radicals will sink to political dirty tricks and downright lies. Some years ago, I read an Australian right-to-choose pamphlet which told teenage girls that 'abortion is the safest surgical procedure in the world' and that it was 'safer than having your tonsils out'!

A final group for whom a pro-abortion position is important are certain medical researchers.

We should be thankful for the wonderful work done by scientists in many fields. But some bio-researchers are hopeful that they will be able to use foetal cells in all kinds of studies and operations; cells that have been 'harvested' from aborted foetuses.

Of course, not everyone in the scientific community is in favour of such activity. Some scientists have openly questioned where this might take us next.

They ask, might we not see in desperately poor countries the forming of 'abortion industries', where women are paid to conceive so that their foetuses can be removed for experimentation?