I NORMALLY look forward to Andrew Tickell’s articles in The National but this week I was disappointed (How Scotland’s Christian right lost politics and fell in love with the law, The National, February 16). He did not seem to understand his subject.

What has happened recently is that Professor Leslie Regan, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in London, has recommended that Misoprostol pills, the second stage of a medical abortion, should be taken by women “in the comfort of their own homes” and that abortion should be treated the same as “any other medical procedure”.

This icy announcement will sicken any woman who has experienced a miscarriage, but the Scottish Government proposes to collaborate in this policy. Therefore, the Scottish Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) has legally challenged the government’s decision on the grounds that by removing medical care and leaving women alone to abort their baby at home, they are opened up to psychologically harrowing procedures, fraught with potentially fatal dangers, including haemorrhaging.

Tickell attacks John Deighan, but why? Is it because Deighan does understand this subject and now speaks for the SPUC? Is he, like Concepta Wood and Mary Doogan, not allowed to make any conscientious objection? Has secular ideology now become the order of the day? It is a hallmark of false ideologies that political correctness quickly becomes mandatory. We are no longer allowed the freedom of conscientious objection.

It will be interesting to see if the Scottish Government will consult or listen on this matter. Abortion truly is the silent holocaust of our times, with 200,000 unborn babies a year killed in abortion centres across the UK. We lose more people from abortion than we have in all our wars. The distribution of Misoprostol pills for home consumption will hide the truth of the matter by putting abortion further under cover.

SPUC does understand that young women can be put under enormous pressure to abort their babies, and so in fact does the Scottish Government. Their recent Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act criminalises psychological domestic abuse, including coerced abortions. Clare Bremner, from Abortion Recovery Helpline, based in Glasgow, has welcomed the act as groundbreaking and overdue, especially because it exposes the most insidious form of domestic abuse, coerced abortion by the man involved, and which is the cause of 75 per cent of the calls for help they receive.

Finally, Tickell pours vitriolic scorn on Christian traditions in Scotland. But the two greatest commandments for Christians are to love the God who loves us with an everlasting love and to love our neighbours as ourselves. Distressed mothers are difficult to help, and unborn babies are very small, but they are our neighbours.

Lesley J Findlay
Fort Augustus

IT is clear from his long letter that William Kelly of Fife does not like John Deighan (Letters, February 19), so I have to take with a pinch of salt his account of John’s opinions. I do know, however, that the Catholic Church has no power to force anyone to do anything. It regards abortion, adultery, assault, incest, masturbation, murder, rape, sodomy, suicide and a lot of other things as sins, but it has no way of stopping people from committing them. It seems unfair to blame the Church when people commit sin, while encouraging people to commit sin. Double-think is rife nowadays.

John Kelly
Kelso

WOULD it not be a more productive use of the anti-abortionists’ time and effort to instead alleviate the suffering felt by people traumatised by abuse at the hands of clergy and other perverts?

Richard Walthew
Duns