Letter: End hypocrisy of abortion rules

Sir: Polly Toynbee (1 January) asserts that those who want to make abortion unlawful again in Britain don't really believe that a blob of an embryo is the same as a baby.

I, for one, don't. But I believe that they are both human beings. Moreover, the embryo at the age of minus six months is the same human being as the resultant baby at the age of plus six months. In other words, the embryo and the baby are the same individual. To kill either of them is rightly classified as a form of murder.

The second plank in Ms Toynbee's argument is that if abortion were really the massacre of the innocents that it is claimed to be, the essentially decent British public would have recoiled in horror from it long before this. Not so. The German people at the time of the Third Reich were basically not less humane and civilised than any other European nation. Yet by and large, they acquiesced in policies of their government that led to the Holocaust.

SEAN MORAN

Dublin