Madam, - That top-of-the-page letter on human embryonic stem cell research from Martin Clynes, Professor of Biotechnology at DCU (June 23rd), could only have been crafted with such an unusual degree of clarity and elegance by one standing at the coalface and knowing what he is writing about. It provokes an explosion of renewed thinking on a whole background of related and burning issues.
Since the 1960s revolution in ideas and behaviour, birth rates and marriage rates have tumbled in affluent Europe and North America, while divorce rates, cohabitation rates and the number of births outside marriage have climbed. The notion gained wide acceptance that behaviour in the highly personal areas of sex and marriage is of no concern to anyone other than the "consenting adults" involved. But when enough people, the critical mass, behave primarily in this way with regard to their own "self-fulfilment", the entire culture is transformed.
The breakdown of the family has had ripple effects on all social structures. The affluent society that does not welcome babies is going to have to learn to welcome immigrants to maintain its economic vigour and its commitment to the health and welfare of its ageing population. The fertility rate in the EU is 1.47, the mere replacement figure being 2.1. Are the great continental movements of people, today's Volkerwanderung, just filling the empty places left by our affluent "demographic winter": not overpopulation, but its very opposite?
Is current EU political thought about an impending welfare crisis, with its secular stench of emptiness and despair, softening us up for the acceptability of the extermination of persons who become burdensome to maintain at life's frail beginnings and endings? - Yours, etc,
Fr TOM KELLEHER, Courceys, Kinsale, Co Cork.