Sir, - Dr Desmond Connell's statements could, on the one hand, be construed as misguided, ill-informed, even blind in their generalisations. On the other hand, they read like a death-cry in the throat of a church which has too frequently misunderstood the simplest of human ideals, one of which is to honour the presence of existing children whom one can afford to nurture materially, as well as emotionally and spiritually.
What Dr Connell suggests in his differentiation between "planned" and "unplanned" children is no more than a considered, but rather desperate distortion of the truth. Here is a representative of the Church flailing out at a society which has gradually eclipsed elements of the authority he represents.
Whether Dr Connell likes it or not, this is an era of choice. The Catholic Church's continued entrenched response to the existence of viable, humane and realistic choice in the area of human sexuality and procreation marks the point at which, within our culture, an essential divergence has gradually and of necessity evolved. Within the niches of our interior lives, our emotional lives, there is surely room also for material considerations. - Yours, etc., Mary O'Donnell,
Newtownmacabe, Maynooth, Co Kildare.