Madam, - Dr Conor Kostick (April 4th) is not happy with my insistence, along with Fr Seamus Murphy SJ (March 28th), that language used in relation to abortion be consistent with the reality with which it deals. Not surprisingly, therefore, he fails to address the central point of our letter (March 28th), namely "that the notion of human rights is completely undermined when they do not have universal application".
Put very simply, at conception a human being comes into existence and he/she is entitled to the fundamental right to life just as much as any other human being. When one group in society dictates who can exercise this right and who cannot, the notion of human rights is clearly undermined and the reign of tyranny is unleashed. Hence our reference to the Nazi pursuit of the Aryan ideal, given that this regime decided that million Jews were not entitled to the right to life. In order to advance its ideal this regime engaged in a systematic distortion of language by means of which it denied human personhood to Jews.
Dr Kostick's reference to the banning of abortion in Germany in 1933, therefore, completely misses the point, namely that all human beings have the right to life. Our insistence on this point with reference to the unborn is not, with all due respect to Dr Kostick, "a debating manoeuvre". It is in fact the "substantive issue".
The challenge for supporters of Doctors for Choice is to address this issue without misapplying rights rhetoric and without introducing irrelevant historical detail. - Yours, etc,
Dr KEVIN E O'REILLY, Milltown Institute, Dublin 6.
A chara, - Kudos to Dr Conor Kostick for highlighting the gaping holes in arguments put forward by Fr Seamus Murphy and Dr Kevin O'Reilly of the Milltown institute, who compared arguments put forward by Doctors for Choice to Nazi rhetoric.
Fr Murphy and Dr O'Reilly glibly dismiss "complications" during pregnancy as not being of sufficient importance to trump the fundamental human right to life of an unborn child. What of Alicja Tysiac's right to health? Now being classified as "significantly disabled", her life is beyond merely "complicated".
I applaud the Irish women who have taken their cases to the European Court of Human Rights and hope we can finally have a little clarity in abortion legislation. I find it pitiful that, once again, a court of law has to address our legislative shortcomings. The lasting murkiness surrounding a woman's right to choose leaves the door wide open for shoddy reasoning by Fr Murphy and Dr O'Neill, who seem to be clutching at any straw to taint such rights. - Is mise,
JULIETTE GASH, Clontarf, Dublin 3.
Madam, - Dr Conor Kostick (April 4th) insists it is unfair to draw an analogy between the language used by abortion advocates today and Nazis because, as he says, abortion was illegal in Nazi Germany. This is at best a half-truth because the Nazis made abortion illegal only for so-called Aryans. This policy was part of an extensive programme of eugenics whereby the population of fit and healthy Aryans was to increase.
For those the Nazis considered undesirable, unfit and unhealthy, abortion was not only legal but actively encouraged and enforced. For those they wished to eliminate they first used dehumanising language that helped overcome the natural human revulsion against murder, then they stripped them of all legal rights, and finally they declared them non-persons to complete the deception.
Abortion was legalised and promoted for non-Aryans in every state the Nazis conquered, including Poland. The saline abortion method was developed in the Nazi death camps through experiments carried out on pregnant Jews and Slavs.
After the war, the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal indicted 10 Nazi leaders for "encouraging and compelling abortion", which it considered a "crime against humanity". As it states in the records of the Nuremberg Tribunal, Race and Resettlement Office, March 1948, "the performance of abortions on eastern workers is a crime against humanity. . .it constitutes an 'act of extermination', 'persecution on racial grounds', and an 'inhumane act'." - Yours, etc,
RAY McINTYRE, Mullingar, Co Westmeath.