Sir, - Ruth Cullen (October 13th) accuses me of resorting to scare tactics in criticising the Government's proposal to amend the Constitution to ensure that in future pregnant and suicidal women or girls, such as Ms X and Ms C, requiring termination of pregnancy to prevent the threat posed to their right to life, will be unable to get the necessary treatment in Ireland. Ms Cullen calls for a debate on the facts and in that case may wish to consider the following:
The Government says its proposal is aimed at allowing pregnant women to receive appropriate treatment as determined by their medical advisers to protect their right to life. Which of the following facts does it (and Ms Cullen) deny? That mental illness is real illness? That psychiatrists are real doctors? That suicide is life-threatening?
Medical evidence given to the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on Abortion shows quite clearly that some psychiatrists consider that abortion can be an appropriate treatment in preventing suicide risk in women with unwanted pregnancies.
In concrete cases, such as the C case and four reported cases in Northern Ireland between 1993 and 1997, medical teams, including psychiatrists, were unanimously of the opinion that abortion was the appropriate treatment for the pregnant and suicidal young women involved.
The Government, in endorsing the views of anti-abortion doctors, is asking us to enshrine in the Constitution a hotly contested medical opinion given in the abstract but to be applied to all women whatever their circumstances and whatever the views of their own doctors.
Ms Cullen refers to Finnish statistics quoted in the All-Party Committee purporting to show that women who have had abortions are more likely to commit suicide than women of child-bearing age as a whole. It is hard to see why statistical evidence is seen as being so definitive that it can be used to prescribe or deny treatment to individual women, irrespective of their particular circumstances or the views of their medical advisers.
Furthermore, it is hard to see how the Finnish statistics are relevant at all. It would be far more relevant to compare suicide rates among women with unwanted pregnancies whose requests to terminate their pregnancies were honoured with those whose requests were denied.
Other statistics quoted in the All-Party Committee hearings showed that suicide rates in pregnant women have dropped considerably in countries where abortion law has been liberalised; studies carried out in the United States in the early 1970s prior to the widespread availability of abortion there show that denial of abortion requests resulted in severe long-term consequences for the mental well-being of women, including a heightened risk of para-suicide.
Other studies, among them one commissioned and endorsed by the anti-abortion, Reagan-appointed US Surgeon-General in the 1980s, show that abortion does not in general pose a significant threat to the physical or mental health of women. - Yours, etc.,
SΘ D'Alton, Palmerston Road, Dublin 6.