Britain: The Archbishop of Canterbury stepped into the debate over abortion in Britain yesterday, saying that there was a "groundswell of distaste" about the current law.
Dr Rowan Williams said there was "more and more of a shared unhappiness and bewilderment around our law and its effects".
He also suggested that the British general election campaign could provide an opportunity for voters to question individual parliamentary candidates over their views.
The archbishop did not say that he was opposed outright to abortion, but that for a large majority of Christians - including himself - it was impossible to regard abortion as "anything other than a deliberate termination of a human life", something which should be taken "seriously" in the debate.
Writing in the Sunday Times, he said: "In the country at large, not least among young people, there is a groundswell of distaste about it [ the law].
"Some of this is to do with sheer statistics. A rising number of abortions means a rising number of - at best - tragic and humanly costly options.
"But the advance of technology has also reinforced anxieties.
"Whether it is a matter of evidence about foetal sensitivity to outside stimuli (including pain), the nature of foetal consciousness, or the expanding possibilities of saving early foetal life outside the womb, the trend is inexorably towards a sharper recognition of the foetus as a natural candidate for 'rights' of some kind.
"In light of this, it is a lot harder to reduce the issue to an individual's right to choose.
"And this is not something said primarily by patriarchal clerics, but increasingly by women, and young women at that.
"The clear assumption that the availability of abortion was a basic element in the agenda for the dignity of women is by no means universally obvious."
A week ago the Conservative party leader, Michael Howard, said that he would be prepared to see the time limit on abortions cut from the current 24 weeks down to 20.
But he stressed that was his personal view and all three main political parties regard abortion as a matter of personal conscience for MPs and not one of party policy.
The archbishop warned, though, that this must not become an "alibi" for avoiding the issue.
He said: "They [ Christians] will want to ask: granted this cannot be an election issue in the sense of being a matter of manifesto policy, what sort of an issue is it going to be? Where and when can our legislators as a body think through where we are and what needs to be taken into consideration about this?
"The idea of a commission has been floated and is worth thinking about further.
"Questions to parliamentary candidates might be a useful way of opening up some public debate (even if this is not a matter of settling electoral preferences) but the debate needs to go much wider.
"Some serious work remains to be done about legal matters (the difficult issue of rights) and about the nature, authority and implications of research around foetal consciousness."
He added: "It would be a real failure if agreeing that it was not an electoral issue provided an alibi for not taking it seriously as a public issue.
"It is worth pondering, with an election in prospect, just what happens to those questions that are not party matters yet are public matters of immense weight.
"It happens that abortion has emerged as potentially one such matter; but there will be others.
"The challenge is about how we keep faith with the seriousness of such questions, and resist the pressure either to make them partisan or to shelve them respectfully and indefinitely."
He dismissed the idea that a debate over abortion in Britain would mirror that in America.
"The idea that raising the issues here is the first step towards a theocratic tyranny or a capitulation to some Neanderthal Christian right is alarmist nonsense," he said.
"One of the confusions that has arisen in the past week is the idea that we are somehow going to be swept up into a British rerun of the US election of 2004, with a moral conservative panic dictating votes.
"It's far from clear that this is what happened in America; and even if it were, we are a long way from any comparable situation here."