Continuous electronic foetal monitoring is now the substitute.
Most women with a breech presentation at term now demand an elective Caesarean section in place of a vaginal delivery or turning the baby. Deskilling of junior obstetricians is the result, not the cause.Ms Kitzinger fails to realise that the “battle for control of women’s bodies” exists only on the pages of her publications. To the vast majority of women and their obstetricians, only two things remain important following delivery – a well mother and a live baby. How these end-points are reached is becoming less important.ROBERT LLEWELYNConsultant Obstetrician & GynaecologistSwansea NHS Trust. Sir: Visitors to Dartmoor would be well advised to study the guidelines issued by the national park authority (report, 27 March). But walkers’ feet are doing far less damage to the moor overall than the combined impact of sheep and military training.

Overgrazing is a particularly serious cause of degeneration of heather moorland on Dartmoor – so much so that the Devon Wildlife Trust have been quoted as saying that there will be no significant areas of heather left on the moor in 10 or 20 years’ time.
ALAN MATTINGLYDirectorThe Ramblers’ AssociationLondon SW8. Sir: John Lyttle decries World In Action’s journalistic standards (“As pathetic as any TV dinner”, 24 March). Please, he says, “could Granada’s flagship perhaps address some real issues?”

Clearly Tory fund-raising, land mines in Angola, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Palestinian anger at Israeli land-grabs in Jerusalem, low wages in Britain and two recent films about the state of the Prison Service are not meat enough for John. We will try harder.
STEVE BOULTONEditor, World In ActionGranada TVManchester.

Sir: Seven days of unending coverage of the election has thrown up four words, all new to me. Having looked them up, and challenged myself to produce one sentence to include all four, I came up with: “Discombobulated by the failure of my merkin to achieve its intended effect, on the basis of its picayune deficiencies, I swore to honour the omerta of sexual deviants such as myself.”

Can anyone improve on that? And what of next week’s obscure words?
DAVID TENCHAmersham, Buckinghamshire. ir: Birds of prey need more protection rather than less if the comments reported by Duff Hart-Davis (“Feathers fly in raptor debate”, 12 March) are typical of hill farmers and gamekeepers. Sparrowhawks are only now returning to the population levels seen earlier this century when songbirds were abundant. It shows a woeful ignorance of predator-prey dynamics to attribute falling populations of farm songbirds to this rise in numbers. Populations of robins and great tits have shown no appreciable decline and they form the main food source for sparrowhawks in many parts of the country. There were no great increases in their numbers in the years of the sparrowhawk’s absence.