Sir, – The Pro Life Campaign has over the years highlighted Ireland’s excellent record in protecting the lives of women in pregnancy and the fact that Ireland without abortion has been among the world leaders in maternal healthcare.
For doing so, we have incurred the displeasure of Fintan O'Toole (Opinion, August 2nd) who accuses us of misrepresenting Ireland's record. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have always based our claims on the most comprehensive international research available in assessing safety for mothers in pregnancy. We have highlighted this research also to challenge the pro-choice claim that Ireland without abortion puts women's lives at risk.
Even going by the recent and more uniform approach Mr O’Toole mentions for assessing maternal healthcare standards, Ireland’s maternal safety record is among the best in the world.
The real issue here however is that he cannot use the research available to show that Ireland’s protection for the unborn child left women’s lives at greater risk. This is not a “factoid”, it is a fact.
But if a factoid is a fragment of pseudo-information repeated so often that it gets taken as a fact, then surely the coverage of the Savita Halappanavar case was the most glaring example of this in recent memory? It is a scandal the way this tragedy was used to introduce abortion on the grounds of threatened suicide even though it had nothing to do with her case.
Meanwhile, the implementation of proper guidelines for the treatment of sepsis in pregnancy was long-fingered instead of being treated as an emergency. And the pro-choice side was claiming all along that its primary concern was women’s lives and health.
In his opening paragraph, Mr O’Toole gave the game away when he referred to “the so-called Pro Life Campaign”. This is the kind of juvenile name-calling that does not augur well for the hope of a mature debate.
– Yours, etc,
CORA SHERLOCK
Pro Life Campaign
Fitzwilliam St Lower,
Dublin 2.