The Editor, Sir:

Mr Frederick Nunes in his Letter of the Day, March 25, commended Barbados for being "ahead of Jamaica in legislation which broadly extended the conditions for legal abortions". I beg to disagree with Mr Nunes' position. Barbados by its legislation has put itself in the camp of those who have sanctioned crimes against humanity.

I believe that the source of our disagreement is the fundamentally different ways in which we see the foetus socially, for it cannot be contested biologically that the foetus is human life.

It appears to me that to persons like Mr Nunes, the foetus has no inherent - only assigned - value. Their position is akin to that of the 1788 United States Constitution, the 1857 US Supreme Court ruling on the Scott Dred case, the Nuremberg laws passed by the Reichstag in Germany in 1935 and the British chattel laws during slavery.

Human life

These laws all assigned less than human value to a particular expression of human life, giving those who so desired the freedom to dispense with that expression of human life as they saw fit. It is no wonder then that bodies of lynched black men, Jews in concentration camps and aborted foetuses all look similar.

Women must never be abused. Similarly, the foetus must never be eviscerated, delimbed, etc, and expelled from the mother's body. We have the capacity to find a better way to deal with the issues which give rise to desire to have induced abortion. Let us find them.

I am, etc.,

Dr WAYNE WEST

wayne_west@hotmail.com

Kingston 6

Via Go-Jamaica