Madam, - Drs Juliet Bressan and Mary Favier (March 25th) encourage women "to vindicate their rights at the European Court of Human Rights" with regard to a "serious clinical issue which affects thousands of patients."
As is commonplace, Drs Bressan and Favier apply the rhetoric of rights to abortion, a misplaced and sinister application of this rhetoric. To demand the "right" to abortion is to demand the "right" to kill a human being. Even when there are complications during pregnancy, the unborn always remains a human being and, as such, is the subject of the most fundamental of human rights, namely the right to life.
It is interesting to note that the Nazi pursuit of the Aryan ideal was characterised by the kind of abuse of language which Doctors for Choice display. Abuse of language distorts reality. And part of reality is that the notion of human rights is completely undermined when they do not have universal application.
When one group within society is given, albeit in a court of law, the power to decide which members of another group have a right to life and which may be killed, that society is then under the reign of tyranny. This is all the more so when we are dealing with the most vulnerable of our fellow human beings. - Yours, etc,
Fr SEAMUS MURPHY SJ, Dr KEVIN E O'REILLY, Milltown Institute, Dublin 6.