Sir, - Some weeks ago I happened to hear an English couple on an Irish radio station outlining how they had lost £40,000 in a case against a medical organisation when two vasectomies had failed them. They now have two, unhappily termed "unplanned for" children. Their main concern seemed to have been at the failure of the second vasectomy.
I remember thinking that there could well be a lot of the selfishness that affects us all involved in situations like this.
I also wondered what would the second child in particular think when she reaches the age when she can find out that her parents took serious steps to prevent her existing and that, further, that they had sued a medical organisation when the measures they had taken to do so had failed.
One shudders to think of the cruelty one might find in some of the retorts which would feature in teenage tantrums.
How refreshing then to hear Archbishop Connell being critical of the idea of children being treated more like "products" rather than sacred human beings. - Yours, etc.,
Sean O Domhnaill, Mountmellick Road, Portlaoise, Co Laois.