Abortion is a minefield of moral dilema but, as with any minefield, we need to find a sensible path through it's ineptitude.

For too long our society have eroniously divided it's legislative and professional medical attentions between early and late stages of a pregnancy whilst also finding reasons to abort under special circumstances right up to full term.

Let us look at the early stage reasons to see if they have any relevance. It is said a premature birth before a certain stage (24, 20 days or whatever) is unlikely to survive and if that were, unhappily, to happen then I am sure the experts would be right most of the time. There will be exceptions too! But, if an abortion is not saught most foetuses of 20 or 24 days would manage to reach full term and be born around their due dates. Some might be premature, but as far as I am aware we have no way of knowing which of them will be so.

So what can we learn from such a superficial observation?

1) From day one each foetus is indistinguishable from another in terms of survivability if only it is left to develop naturally inside a womb;

2) If an abortion were to be permitted at an early stage it is self evident we accept that a birth event is a certainty. Otherwise why are we considering performing an abortion?

3) We cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that a minor number of abortions are sanctioned after 24 days.

I submit that we have misled ourselves over the real issues here. A death is a death whichever way you care to describe it.

If we are still to consider sanctioning abortions we should have a single set of rules instead of two different sets of rules which apply before or after 24 days and it is time we bit this moral bullet.

Though this is a complex issue of many facets I would just mention one other. There appears to be a strong relationship between the social errors that we have made for a long time in the legal domain of abortion and the similar errors made more recently in the legal domain of Human Rights.

The connection here is a simple one that has, so far been disregarded by what some call "The Nanny State".

On the one hand, barring pregnancies resulting from: rape; under age sex or personal adult learning difficulties, we have a clear, consential and legal relationship that created a pregnancy. Should an abortion be used subsequently by the state to rectify what in retrospect may be viewed by either party, or their representatives, as a mistake? Where then is any responsibility attributed to the individuals involved in the first place?

On the other hand why should a person retain their human rights after they have seriously endangered the human rights of another. Again it is as if the state is seeking to intervene without giving any due care and attention to what the individuals did in the first place.