A chara, – The letter by Jaime Todd-Gher and Christina Zampas, human rights lawyers for Amnesty International, makes for fascinating reading (April 28th). It is of particular interest that they admit that there is no explicit right to an abortion in international human rights law and claim instead there is an "interpreted right".
This interpretation is "grounded in decades of jurisprudence from a range of human rights bodies and experts" – meaning it is the opinion of organisations such as Amnesty and, inter alia, various like-minded UN committees and the lawyers and academics they employ. What is even more interesting amidst all their claims to an interpreted right to an abortion is what they leave out – that the right to life is not an interpreted right under human rights law but an explicit right.
However, it is good after a seemingly endless cascade of claims from Amnesty’s Irish branch that abortion was a right that was clearly set out in human rights treaties to which Ireland was a signatory to have it clarified that this is not the situation at all. I look forward to their explanation as to how their opinion, and that of like-minded advocates of abortion, as to what is unstated in these international agreements somehow supersedes what they actually say. – Is mise,
Rev PATRICK G BURKE,
Castlecomer,
Co Kilkenny.
Sir, – Thank you to Jaime Todd-Gher and Christina Zampas for clarifying the issue of Amnesty’s campaign for abortion as a human right, and for explaining its context, as part of joined-up women’s healthcare thinking around the world. The pro-life lobby in Ireland is determined to keep us isolated and separate from the healthcare norms of the developed world – a “beacon of hope”, as they would see it, against the tide of immoral secular change that has swept through the world especially since the latter part of the 20th century. However, the more clearly and often that modern enlightened thinking is explained in regards to women’s reproductive rights, the more irrefutable becomes the case for an immediate referendum on repealing the Eighth Amendment. – Yours, etc,
JOE McCARTHY,
Arbour Hill,
Dublin 7.