Madam, - Fifty years ago, when I was a student in England, 10 years before Britain's abortion legislation, one of our lecturers, an eminent professor of paediatric surgery told us: "Paediatricians are tainted with the view that neonatal abnormalities should not be treated. They believe that it is better for the family that siblings be spared the handicapped child who is treated as a scapegoat and, as on Good Friday, one should die for the sake of the others".
We all carry some lethal genes, as did this fine man who, in his own words, was "born deformed". He had the condition Spina Bifida. Becoming an orthopaedic surgeon, he specialised in closing the lesion in babies at about 18 months of age. What a loss for medicine it could have been had he been conceived today, when abortion is freely available in Britain if this defect is suspected. - Yours, etc,
ROSEMARY MURPHY HOPKINS,
(Retired paediatric physiotherapist),
Foxford,
Co Mayo.