Sir, - Stirling Scruggs, director of information for UNFPA (the UN Family Planning Association), took advantage of your recent coverage of International Women's Day to write to your paper expressing appreciation of what you had written and taking the opportunity to put in a plug for the work that organisation is doing for women - without exposing the part it plays in enforcing birth control, in its many forms, in developing countries.
His concern for women entrapped in gender violence did not appear to stretch to the Chinese one-child per family programme nor seek to protect the pre-born from abortion globally having regard to the fundamental human rights involved.
Nor does he indicate that the work of UNFPA in the area of childbirth includes abortion and abortifacient procedures in the "lifesaving services" to the mother, regardless of the origin of the pregnancy. His figure of 515,000 deaths due to childbirth would be more informative if expressed as a percentage of the total pregnancies in the countries mentioned and might well bear testimony to the midwifery expertise of the native population in successive generations before the operations of UNFPA.
Mr Scruggs, in expressing gratitude for the funding of UNFPA by governments - including Ireland's generosity - fails to undertake that that UN offshoot will abandon funding the Chinese one-child-per-family programme initiated in 1979 and UNFPA's other "world population control" projects which includes involuntary sterilisation and abortion on a global scale, which are anathema to people - such as the Irish - who predominantly professes the Christian faith. - Yours, etc.,
Nial Darragh, Chairman, Council of Social Concern, Orwell Road, Dublin 6.
