Madam, - Miriam Duggan FRCOG (July 28th) wants to know why teenagers are engaging in sexual activity. You might as well ask why teenagers slam doors and write bad poetry.
I think the time has come for us to accept that teenagers are sexually active. Statistics in the US show that "abstinence only" sex education is a failure and what is needed is open and honest education on the best methods to avoid disease and pregnancy.
Ms Duggan is incorrect in her statement that the morning-after pill is an abortifacient: in Europe and the US an abortifacient is classified as something taken to end a pregnancy after implantation has occurred. The Irish Medicines Board confirmed this in 2001 following recommendations from the cabinet sub-committee on abortion.
Education, not misinformation, please. - Yours, etc,
MARIE SANDLAND , Laurence Court, Dublin 6w.
Madam, - I believe much of the reaction to the Tánaiste's comments regarding the provision of the morning-after pill to girls as young as 11 is unfair. We have to keep in mind the context in which they were made. Ms Harney was speaking following the publication of the report of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency and qualified her remarks with "in certain circumstances". She was also referring to an earlier conversation she had had with a member of the Irish Nurses Organisation who had told her she had dealt with girls who were sexually active at the age of 11. If the Tánaiste had said that under no circumstances should the morning-after pill be made available to girls as young as 11 she would have had other critics accusing of not living up to her responsibilities as Minister for Health.
I feel sorry for Mary Harney as she was clearly between a rock and a hard place. The key question for those who have criticised her is: which is the better option - the morning-after pill or an 11-year-old mother? - Yours, etc,
J. LAVERY, Greystones, Co Wicklow.
Madam, - As I look at my granddaughter, I contemplate how fleeting the three short years have been since she was a mere five, and I know how soon it will be that she will be only 11 years old. As I look at her also I see a vivid reminder of the risks of even the healthiest childhood in a nurturing environment: she is sporting proudly a beautiful black eye. I am almost as un-upset about it as she is, since a childhood without risk would hardly be worth living. Yet a risk that I find almost impossible to contemplate is that in three or four short years from now a morning could arrive when she might find that, within her own childish body, a new child has just been sent forth on its perilous journey through life.
"Crisis pregnancy" is a truly despicable term, but what sharper crisis can there be than that childhood pregnancies now have been brought from the remotest risk to a terribly present reality?
Is it not the sharpest point of that crisis that the main response is the execution of a "morning after" killing, so that the very first risk encountered by the new life is, fatally, its last? Why do we turn our backs on our sacred duty to provide the nurturing environment for our children - for the whole of their childhoods from indeterminate beginning to indeterminate end - that will reduce these abominable risks to the humanly possible minimum?
One reason, it is obvious, is the sick ideology that now taboos any limit on sexual activity. That is an activity that is limited in the whole of Nature, restrained, bound and confined to the particular contexts appropriate to the species. How overweening of humanity to assert that it is exempt! Certain it is that, if the depths are sufficiently plumbed, the rebound will carry us to heights more uncomfortable than humanity has seen yet. - Yours, etc,
FRANK FARRELL, Lakelands Close, Stillorgan, Co Dublin.