Professor Hugh McLachlan makes some mistakes in his assessment of Christian teaching on abortion (Letters, June 3).

Professor Hugh McLachlan makes some mistakes in his assessment of Christian teaching on abortion (Letters, June 3).

He argues that what he perceives to be the lack of references to abortion in the Bible is evidence that in early Christianity, the question was not directly addressed as to whether or not an embryo is due the moral status of a person. In fact, there is an outright condemnation of both abortion and infanticide (Didache 11.2).

Professor McLachlan also falls into the not uncommon error of mistaking the views of individuals within the church, however eminent, for the authoritative teaching of the church. Individual theologians may have expressed views on the humanity of the embryo then as now, but there is a litmus test of Catholic doctrine and it is this: we are only required to believe that which has been taught from the beginning, from the time of the apostles, and with apostolic authority.

Contrary to what Professor McLachlan says, the Catholic Church has always maintained that from conception embryos have souls and are due the same respect as normal mature persons.

Patricia McKeever, Editor, Catholic Truth, 10 Sandyford Place, Glasgow.

Alasdair H B Fyfe rejects my assertion that "at no point in the gospels, or even in the Bible in its entirety, is the question of whether or when an embryo is due the moral status of a person directly addressed" (Letters, June 4). However, the texts that he quotes tend to support, rather than to refute it.

For instance, he quotes from Genesis 1.26: "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness." Whatever, inference Mr Fyfe draws, correctly or incorrectly from this text, the text does not directly deal with the questions at issue, even if it might touch upon them indirectly.

He writes: "If we go by these scriptures, then the Christian surely should gauge the moral status of the embryo as being human from the very beginning." Of course a human embryo is human and it is an embryo. What, if anything, follows from this is what is contentious.

Consider the following text from Exodus chapter 21, verse 22. It says, in the Authorised Version: "If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall surely be punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine."

In other words, it is not murder to kill a foetus or so this text might be interpreted as implying. It is a matter for civil rather than the criminal law. This text does not seem to support the view of abortion that has been put forward, wrongly in my view, as the only possible Christian one.

Irrespective of one's religious beliefs, abortion is and should be considered to be an important moral issue. It is a complex matter about which reasonable people might reasonably disagree.

Professor Hugh V McLachlan, School of Law and Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University.