Who needs abortions when baby could be adopted?

Should it be 24 weeks as of now? Should it be the 20 weeks as suggested by Michael Howard, or the 22 favoured by Charles Kennedy? Or should it be no weeks at all except in the most exceptional circumstances?

You don't have to be religious to be deeply concerned about the rightness of abortion as a means of birth control, which is what it's long since become. The taking of human life is a moral issue. Can it ever be right unless it's with the agreement of the individual concerned, as in the case of voluntary euthanasia?

Any view of abortion has to depend on just when you think life begins. Personally, I no longer have any doubt that it's at the very moment the egg and the sperm combine. At that split second a new individual is created. The blueprint is there for the way it will look and, in part at least, the way it will behave.

For some days it won't be recognisable, but then its head and body will start to take shape. Its arms and legs and fingers will develop. Its eyes and nose, mouth and ears, will be clearly seen by those with the special cameras to view such miracles. It will have a brain and whatever we choose to think of as a soul. And yet it will be legally acceptable for it to be killed.

That can't be right, surely? Yet it must often seem the only way to a woman faced with the two stark main options which are likely to be presented to her: keeping "it" or getting rid of "it". Too often, for economic and social reasons, the latter path must seem the best and perhaps the only one - although it might well be taken reluctantly and how many afterwards must bitterly regret it?

Yet there is another option: adoption. It's become fashionable to discredit that in recent years. TV documentaries and dramas and newspaper and magazine features have focused on mother-child reunions, presenting natural mothers as victims who were forced by families and social convention to "give away" their babies, with the latter also seen as victims who had to grow up separated from their birth parent.

The adoptive parents are barely given a mention. Yet it's they who have been only too willing to devote years of love and care and worry to bringing up as their own a child born of someone else.

Largely adoptive parents don't do it as a selfless act. They do it because they want children but can't have them themselves for various reasons. So they give their love to an adopted child and in return receive the love that child has to give.

Except fewer and fewer get that chance because so many pregnant girls and women would rather have an abortion than go through the full pregnancy and then part company with their baby. Yet surely nine months isn't a lot to give out of your own life so that another life you have helped to create can be saved?

In the 1960s and earlier more people believed that. I am eternally grateful that they did. If abortion had always been as accessible and acceptable as it is today, the adopted son and daughter who my wife and I love dearly might never have been born and we would have been denied the chance to get to know the grandson who is the light of our lives.

You can appreciate why air crews might be a bit anxious these days, with the terrorist threat ever present. But it's possible to be over-cautious.

A case in point, surely, was the British Airways captain who refused to take off from Hong Kong airport until a 58-year-old British businessman who has been a diabetic for 35 years put his "insulin pens" into the baggage hold.

Cliff Salmon refused, quite correctly pointing out that he might need to use one of them during the 13-hour flight home, but because he didn't have a note from his doctor confirming that he was a bona fide diabetic he was made to leave the plane and catch a flight with Cathay Pacific, who clearly are a bit more pragmatic.

This happened after Mr Salmon was cleared by a check-in security person to carry his insulin with him, which surely should have been enough for the captain.

Perhaps the poor chap had had a bad day, or he might have realised that there was a third way: have Mr Salmon entrust him with looking after the insulin pens in the cockpit where the passenger could use one under close supervision if necessary.

All other diabetics had best make a mental note to get a letter from their doctor if they are intending to fly with BA, in case they run up against this unbending jobsworth.

Many thanks to those readers who took the trouble to respond after I asked last Saturday what you thought about the Priestley plan for the centre of Bradford. I'll return to that subject with a selection of your comments in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, I should make it clear that the views expressed by me in this column about what should be done with the Odeon (or about anything else for that matter) are my own and don't necessarily reflect official Telegraph & Argus policy. The big privilege that comes with writing a personal column is that you're allowed to express a personal view which might or might not agree with the opinion of the editor of the newspaper in which you write.

That freedom of the press, allowing a diversity of views to help a debate along, is vital to the democratic process and something we're fortunate to still have in this country.

The deaths of all those hundreds of thousands of people in the Asian tsunami might have been expected to have numbed our response to lesser tragedies. Yet the real feelings of sorrow and empathy which followed the deaths of a mother and two children swept from the North Bay promenade at Scarborough suggest differently.

Perhaps that's because the losses in the mighty tidal wave which swamped whole islands were so massive that it was beyond the ability of most of us to reduce them to individual human terms. But the deaths of Kim Barrett and her children Aimee and Luke were a small-scale tragedy close to home and on familiar territory.

They were a family like us doing something that families like us do: enjoying the thrill of fleeing the spray from the big waves that break against the sea wall in stormy conditions.

I've done it myself with our children, on that very slipway. The worst we got was a bit damp.

Kim Barrett and her children were there on the wrong day, when the sea was too turbulent an opponent to take on. They gambled and lost and they paid the ultimate price, with Kim Barrett instinctively doing what most parents would do in similar circumstances - leaping into the water without any thought for herself to try to save her babies.

There but for fortune go any of us, which is perhaps why their deaths have touched so many people so deeply.

Yet again the so-called mental-health professionals have let themselves be fooled into thinking that a homicidal maniac had somehow been cured of his killer compulsions.

Peter Bryant, released from Rampton high security hospital into the care of a mental health unit at an open hospital from where he could come and go as he pleased only to kill again (and fry and eat the brain of his victim), is said to have been able to fool doctors about his mental state because of his ability to appear normal.

These people are supposed to be experts. As such you would think they would be able to spot a phoney. But no, they're so vain, so determined to believe that their judgement is infallible and so confident in their ability to heal minds which are beyond any sort of salvation, that they're in denial over the possibility that a clever patient might be able to hoodwink them.

Even after his terrible, cannibalistic crime Bryant wasn't locked up where he could do no-one else any harm. He was sent to Broadmoor secure mental hospital for assessment and there he was apparently so poorly supervised that he was able to kill a fellow patient by smashing his head on the floor.

It's obvious that the supervision both in the community and in hospital of people with violent mental-health problems is woefully inadequate. Unless or until it can be improved there should be no question of giving the benefit of the doubt to those who have harmed people in the past and could well be tempted to do so again in the future.

n The success of Tony Christie's re-issue of Amarillo, thanks to comedian Peter Kay, shouldn't really be all that surprising. It's a terrific song. On top of those people who loved it first time around and those who've danced to it in the long years since at wedding receptions, parties and discos, there's a whole new generation who have been brought up on the dire stuff that fills the charts and radio airtime nowadays.

n Small wonder they've taken to Amarillo, having been so badly starved of songs with a strong tune, rousing and singable chorus and lyrics which are easy to remember.

n Maybe the time's right for Black Lace to try to interest Kay in reviving Agadoo. But then again, maybe not...