Madam, – Eighteen years after the X case and following 18 years of total failure on the part of the Government to provide appropriate legislation, the Minister for Health responds to the European Court of Human Rights ruling saying it would take time. I think close to two decades is sufficient time. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – May I make this comment on abortion, on this cascade of destruction wrought on those to whom we owe the greatest solidarity and duty of care? The first right we all possessed was the right to be born. But today legal permissive abortion is a fact of life so deeply embedded and even normalised in many lands that it is deemed a taboo to mention it to people who might glow white-hot over other aspects of justice.
The effectiveness of propaganda campaigns to deaden consciences and enforces conformism that fears to question what is claimed to be a settled issue has apparently worked. Why? The benefits of a set-up that make acceptable even the killing of innocents, deemed worthless by their protectors, on a scale that freezes the imagination. This is the nub of that ideological word choice.
So much else can be chosen in a given life, so many intoxicating “freedoms” newly established, if only the option to dispose of unwanted children is dependably available. We must ask: how will a society, a highly rights-aware European one, regard itself and its culture, permeated with its Christian and Christmas origins, if it gives its approval to all this? The granting to ourselves of the right wantonly to kill, each year, millions of our offspring at the beginning of their lives – maybe life’s end is also being looked at – is the question of questions for Europe and beyond.
This practice of abortion is indeed a mortal wound at Europe’s heart. We must re-enliven the value of human life – even though in science’s Petri dish our origins may look like the rabbit’s to some of our bioethics people – and creatively envisage new and compelling answers to the problems that give rise to this atrocity, this scar on our civilisation. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – The decision of the European Court of Human Rights is to be welcomed. The people of Ireland by referendum in 1983 decided that equal regard should be given to the right to life of the unborn child and the right to life of a mother.
This has been enshrined in our Constitution as Article 40.3.3. When a mother is terminally ill and an abortion will save her life, the rights of both the mother and the unborn child are equal. Successive governments have failed to legislate in order to clarify the scope of this constitutional provision. This has been left to the Irish courts.
The ECHR decision focuses on the failure to legislate and the ensuing denial of the mother’s human rights. The consequent black hole has meant that supporting services for women could not come into being.
Abortion will not become an election issue. The voice and rights of women will become an election issue. A society which allows another baby be found in a plastic bag will become an election issue.
Article 41.2.1-2 provides that women may not be compelled to work outside the home. Many women would like to choose to stay at home during their children’s formative years. Others prefer to work. Let us have choice, real choice. Many women are now trapped with astronomical mortgages in negative equity and cannot afford even to have children, let alone stay at home to rear them. The failure to have any regard for equality for women has fuelled this economic meltdown. The failure also to have regard for and to respect the value of motherhood has also fuelled our meltdown. Let us not kick women around as a political football in the coming general election. Instead let women participate.
EITHNE REID O’DOHERTY
Irish board member of European Women Lawyers’ Association,
Barrister-at-Law Law Library,
Four Courts,
Dublin 7.
Madam, – Alex Barton (December 17th) is not wrong when he says the Catholic Church has had some influence on the abortion question in Ireland. But he repeats a flimsy mantra that the law “force(s) every woman in Ireland to live with the yoke of the Catholic Church’s view on abortion.” The prohibition of abortion reflects the public’s vote in a number of past referendums – not the church’s.
It is a tired, but oft-repeated, cliché that abortion is illegal primarily, largely, or even solely because of the church. Not only is this view patronising in the extreme, suggesting that people are unable to weigh moral issues themselves, it also seeks to capitalise on the widespread unpopularity of the church, something which has nothing to do with the issue.
Finally, such a view seeks to paint people who are pro-life as necessarily religious and therefore having objections which are not rational or scientific but spiritual. The reality is that many, perhaps even a majority, of people who have moral objections to abortion do not follow the church or even consider themselves religious. In fact, there is no contradiction in being both pro-life and an atheist.
As we open another divisive and heated debate on abortion, can we please agree to leave out these worn out assumptions from the discussion? – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Who does Enda Kenny think he is, giving an undertaking to a Catholic newspaper that his Fine Gael party will not legislate for abortion if it is voted into power (Front page, December 17th). It is time he and politicians like him are made to understand that when they are elected they represent all the people of the state and not just one sectional grouping, no matter how large it is. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Your Editorial on abortion (December 17th) states that “the Government will also have to clear a way through medical ethics constraints to ensure that at least some doctors and hospitals will be able to perform the small number of abortions likely to be needed”.
The ethical guidelines issued to doctors by the Irish Medical Council are available on the council’s website and are quite clear. While reminding doctors that abortion is illegal in Ireland except where there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother, and also reminding doctors that it is illegal to encourage or advocate abortion, nowhere in the guidelines does it state that the practice of abortion, in itself, constitutes unprofessional or unethical conduct. – Yours, etc,