It is perfectly legal, and remains so, to destroy the innocent baby in the womb, deliver the corpse and incinerate it.

The other guilty party must be kept fed, watered, warm, safe, fit and healthy and may make claim to some basic human rights.

I didn't have a strong view on abortion until I heard and then read last week the story of a mum who gave premature birth to a 22-week-old baby son.

She told how medical staff, using the 24-week abortion limit as a guide, told her the child was "not viable" and placed the tiny body in her arms in the expectation that he would be dead within minutes or, at best, a few hours.

Thirty-six hours later the tiny baby boy was still fighting for survival, despite having had, up to that point, no medical intervention.

Then the doctors changed their minds and took action. Today that boy is like any other. His proud mum told how he had caught his peers up in terms of growth and overtaken many in terms of intellect. He has no health problems and is a normal, active, inquiring, loving and much-loved youngster.

Her experience proved that babies as young as 22 weeks – two weeks under the current legal abortion limit and at the limit for abortions defeated in the House of Commons last week – can and do live and thrive. They are not a cluster of unrecognisable cells. They are real humans who, without intervention, will be real people.

She brought the inhumanity of it all home when she said that it was bizarrely acceptable to kill a baby in the womb and deliver it already dead when there would be horror if babies at this age were born alive and then killed. But what's the difference, she asked.

I find it difficult to argue with that. In the same way that I find it difficult to justify the destruction of any child when there is a chance, however slim, that survival, and survival to full health and fitness, is a possibility.

Capital punishment was abandoned in this country for, among others, very similar reasoning – that just one person sentenced to death by mistake would be one too many to risk.

The difference in the treatment meted out by our society to the most depraved in society struck me when, shortly after listening to this mother, I listened to a debate on the merits of resurrecting the death penalty.

It seems to be there are double standards being used here.

It is a difficult one, I'm not denying that. There may be circumstances where abortion can be justified on purely medical grounds.

But I'd never want to be the one to have to make the decision to kill a perfectly-formed and potentially viable and utterly-innocent infant, who never asked to be created but, having been so has the same right to life as everyone and everything else.