Sir, – Seamus O’Callaghan (February 19th) suggests that legislating for the X case can be avoided if we restrict the movements of troublesome women and ensure they are watched at all times.
Perhaps he is not a frequent reader of your fine paper. We already tried this solution. It was not judged a success. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – I note that Seamus O’Callaghan’s suggestion of detaining suicidal pregnant women against their will comes, ironically, in the week of the 21st anniversary of Martyn Turner’s iconic X case cartoon. This cartoon, also published in The Irish Times, made the same point: that Ireland was a place of internment for a suicidal 14-year-old girl.
The Irish people rose up in their thousands on the streets and in their hundreds of thousands at the ballot boxes to reject this cruel, barbaric and inhumane treatment then; they would reject it even more roundly now.
Imprisonment is no form of health treatment. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Former taoiseach John Bruton is to be congratulated on stating so clearly a fact that is rather embarrassing for An Taoiseach Enda Kenny and any other TDs who support abortion legislation, namely, that the “plain words” of the Irish Constitution acknowledge an “equal right to life” of a mother and her unborn child (Opinion, February 15th), which right is incompatible on its face with legal access to abortion on grounds of suicidal ideation.
Any legislation that permits abortion on suicidal grounds would create an obvious inequality between the life of mother and child, since the uncertain risk that the mother may unilaterally take her own life is treated as a sufficient reason for directly inflicting certain death on her unborn child, rather than as a medical condition requiring normal, nondestructive, and medically established methods of treatment.
No matter what one believes about the morality of abortion, it cannot be reasonably denied that a law permitting abortion as a “therapy” (of extremely dubious medical standing) for treating suicidal ideation treats the two lives unequally, not equally.
Nothing the Supreme Court said 20 years ago, and nothing abortion advocates have said in the intervening years, proves otherwise. – Yours, etc,