The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has said that abortion is becoming common place in today's society, and people are now becoming insufficiently troubled about terminating their pregnancies.

|PIC1|The Church of England leader was writing for a special feature for the Observer newspaper released to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Britain's Abortion Act, which legalised the procedure.

The spiritual leader of the world's 77-million Anglicans told that people needed to think hard about the consequences of their actions.

He wrote: "Recent discussion on making it simpler for women to administer abortion-inducing drugs at home underlines the growing belief that abortion is essentially a matter of individual decision and not the kind of major moral choice that should involve a sharing of perspective and judgment.

"Something has happened to our assumptions about the life of the unborn child," he added.

Across England and Wales in 2005 there were just under 200,000 abortions, according to the Department of Health, and a recent survey carried out by Lancet, a medical journal, revealed that thirty percent of pregnancies in Europe now end in abortion.

A very public debate is currently taking place in Britain with pro-life campaigners calling for the upper limit on abortions to be shortened from 24 weeks to at least 21 weeks. However, a recent parliamentary bill on the matter was defeated.

Pro-lifers have expressed their dismay at how the limit could still remain at 24 weeks, one of the highest in Europe, when current figures reveal that about 50 per cent of extremely premature babies born at 24 weeks were able to survive.

Although the Archbishop of Canterbury did not make any direct call for the upper limit to be reduced he did highlight the paradox between those who campaign for greater "foetal rights," condemning women who smoke during pregnancy, but fail to speak out about abortion.

Britain currently has one of the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe, and an increasing number if those pregnancies are now ending in abortion.

Dr Williams wrote that when the Abortion Act was introduced in 1967 it was not meant to bring about "easy abortions", but to provide an option for women who found themselves in extreme cases

He concluded, "What people might now call their 'default position' was still that abortion was a profoundly undesirable thing and that a universal presumption of care for the foetus from the moment of conception was the norm."