Sir, - For quite some time now The Irish Times has had many of its best people put their best efforts into trying to justify abortion. For reasons that are all too obvious, none has met with real success.
The Irish Medical Council has disposed of the alleged need for abortion to save the life of the mother. In the case of a claimed risk of suicide, no psychiatrist has been found who will say that abortion in such circumstances is necessary or beneficial. In the case of rape, the Attorney-General, Mr McDowell, has recently said, if not for quite the right reasons, that alleged rape is not a practical ground for granting an exemption. With that goes incest. Together, all these grounds constitute some 0.004 per cent of actual abortions.
Then there's the question of clarification for worried masters of maternity hospitals who, allegedly, fear prosecution in cases so numerically minute that a useful statistic cannot be quoted. The experience of employing this ground in the UK has not been good.
So what is left? Abortion as a human right. A human right of one group of people to take the lives of those of another group? That will only work if that other group can be sufficiently dehumanised. However, here too the experience has not been good, and history has taken a dim view when it was tried on previous occasions.
Last, but not least, is abortion a service to women, or is it a service to the industry that provides it? The smoking of tobacco may not seem to provide a relevant parallel, but it will be remembered that, largely because vested interests were involved, it took very many decades and mountains of evidence to prove the obvious. In the case of abortion, we should not allow ourselves to be blindfolded to its consequences, or to tolerate similar decades of injury.
Isn't it time you called it a day? - Yours, etc.,
Donal O'Driscoll, Dargle Road, Blackrock, Co Dublin.