Woolly thinking

From Mr Jim Allen SIR – I much enjoyed Quentin de la Bédoyère’s exposure of woolly thinking and the deceitful use of words in the embryo debate (August 20). Let me put something forward from that most “unwoolly” of books, the Bible.
In Jeremiah 1:5, the Lord says to his future prophet, “Before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother, I knew thee: and before thou camest out of the womb, I sanctified thee, and made thee a prophet unto the nations.” This shows that, even if very few of us are called to such illustrious service, each one of us, with our own individual characteristics, was in the mind of God through all eternity.
He cherishes and forms us throughout our lives (“The hairs of your head are numbered”). Anyone who frustrates or destroys this plan, at any stage whatsoever, commits a very serious sin indeed.
It makes no difference if the unborn child looks like a tiny blob of jelly or has recognisable human form; to destroy it is to defy God’s intention in the serious matter of creating a human being.
Do these considerations not bypass all the complicated arguments about “personhood” and “ensoulment” and make them redundant?
Yours faithfully JIM ALLEN Torquay, Devon