Sir, – The Belfast Feminist Network (Opinion, December 5th), no more than any other group, does not own the word "feminist", nor can it pontificate on what constitutes "human rights".
There are strong arguments for seeing the abortion movement as not feminist at all, but as a patriarchal undermining of one of the most feminine human conditions – pregnancy and motherhood – and for seeing human rights as encompassing the human foetal right to life. It seems to me that the intolerant self-righteousness which characterised much of the anti-abortion cause in Ireland for 30 years is now a dominant trait of the pro-choice movement.
Many of us have passionate beliefs on this issue, but some of us struggle to avoid stereotyping people with whom we disagree, such as that evidenced in the article in the caricature of “pious misogynistic authoritarianism that so often lurks behind the pro-life rhetoric of care and compassion”.
Finola Meredith’s article begs the question as to whether getting “stuck in there in full public view” to “defeat their opponents” is the best way to engage with such an existential and complex subject of abortion.
Perhaps if we all look not for the worst but for the good in our opponents’ viewpoints; and concede that people who see things differently to us may nevertheless be people of good faith, we might create a more dispassionate, supportive and healing climate for this debate.
– Yours, etc,
BRENDAN LAWLER
Clondalkin,
Dublin 22.