Sir, - In an article headed "A David to fight evil of artificial contraception" (Rite and Reason, November 17th) Frank Flanagan states: "The wholesale acceptance and the practice of the evil of artificial contraception is akin to an infectious, sterile disease which has reached plague proportions. That it traces its development and growth to the negative attitudes of clergy who failed to expose its lethal effects is a scandal. We now have a physician with a cure. If his colleagues will go with him Ireland's soul can be saved. Well done, Father David O'Hanlon."
It seems an appropriate time to remind your readers of an article in your newspaper some years ago entitled "The Wisdom of Solomons", in which Victoria White interviewed the distinguished and compassionate obstetrician/ gynaecologist Dr Michael Solomons, on the publication of his memoir Pro-Life? The Irish Question. Speaking of his 50 years of Irish obstetrical practice, Dr Solomons said: "I wanted to let the present generation know about a past of which they're unlikely to be aware."
In that recent past, men like the youthful celibate David, now lauded by the blinkered Frank Flanagan, dictated that every sex act must be open to conception. Dr Solomons wrote that when he was a medical student and young doctor in the late 1930s and 1940s, it was the reign of the "grand multiparas", a term coined in Dublin for women who had seven or more pregnancies. When he was working as assistant Master of the Rotunda Hospital "he saw a 26-year-old woman on her sixth pregnancy go blind, only to return pregnant again the following year. In three years in the late 1940s, 23 women and 800 babies died in the hospital. Continual child-bearing often had horrible consequences for women's health. The uterus became so stretched that the baby was in the wrong position at birth. Often the afterbirth would lie in front of the baby, blocking its exit from the womb. Women might haemorrhage after birth as the uterus would become so floppy as to fail to contract. High blood pressure and convulsions were potential killers. The laws of Church and State prevented many women taking effective steps to prevent pregnancy."
"For them," wrote Dr Solomons, "pregnancy was to be a death sentence." As no mechanical method of preventing conception was available, people improvised. A colleague of Dr Solomons attended the birth of a baby who was born with the top of a Guinness bottle on his head. The mother had hoped it would act as a contraceptive. It is worth stressing, Dr Solomons stated, "that this savage state of affairs would still exist if the wishes of fundamentalist Catholics, some of whom are still with us, had been fully respected".
Fortunately for Irish women now, the "Truth" (Letters, November 23rd) is that males, celibate or otherwise, no longer hold dominion over women's fertility, which is an unpalatable fact for fundamentalists to accept, thanks to good people like Dr Michael Solomons. Pro-Life? The Irish Question, published by The Lilliput Press, deserves to be reprinted as a potent reminder of one of the dark sides of "the rare oul' times" in Ireland. - Yours, etc., Patricia Wall,
Main Street, Ennistymon, Co Clare.