WHAT has dismayed me, amid all the furore over the case of the pregnant 12-year-old being paid by the Catholic Church in Scotland to keep her baby rather than have an abortion, has been the overwhelming disregard for surely the most important individual in the whole sorry story -namely, the child she is carrying.

It is, to me, an eloquent commentary on the all-too-easy disposability nowadays of the unplanned unborn when we hear from the much-criticised group running this scheme that the apparent toss-up on this child being born or terminated was over the girl's parents being able to afford clothes for it.

Being unemployed, they decided they could not.

But because they agreed that their daughter would be devastated if she had to get rid of the child, they turned to the scheme run by the RCs in Scotland for help.

Goodness knows what this unborn baby may feel one day on discovering that he or she is alive only by virtue of a religious charity having stumped up for the nappies, bootees and matine jackets an infant needs at the outset. But does not this saga put into sharp focus the whole dreadful business of how life has become cheapened by the abortion laws this country passed 30-odd years ago?

We find the Church being criticised for putting its religious principles before children's welfare with claims, such as that put by Jane Roe, of the Abortion Law Reform Association, that "they are just trying to prevent women having an abortion - they are not thinking about the women themselves."

Even if this is true - and, so, does not include any concern at all about what the effects may be on a 12-year-old "woman" bowing to the pressure put on her by social workers and teachers to have an abortion - it cannot be denied that, unlike the rest, the people running this scheme are at least putting the child in the equation.

Is it not time that this was done, too, by the government? The evidence is that the 1967 Abortion Act has become a virtual on-demand instrument for after-the-event contraception, terminating some 177,000 pregancies annually or about five million since it became law, and is now nothing more than the means for wholesale pre-natal genocide.

Surely, when excuses for abortions can be the affordability of a child's layette - or, as was shockingly revealed by doctors last year, that a young woman was allowed to terminate two pregnanies because she did not like the looks of the babies' fathers - the time for a debate on whether the system is far too easy is long overdue.

Not least for the sake of those who cannot participate but who are the most crucial individuals in it.

We hear so much about a woman's right to choose, but what of her unborn child's?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.