Sir, – Further to Prof Noam Chomsky’s reference to abortion “rights” (Home News, April 3rd). It is time to have some reporting of abortion statistics to balance the throwaway one-sided calls that go unchallenged and reported as “rights”.
Could we please note that almost 55 million abortions have taken place in the United States alone since the Roe v Wade case; only 4 per cent of these were for "health" reasons.
There are up to 200 million women missing from the world's population because of gender-based abortion and infanticide. This issue is regularly written about in the Economist and reported on the BBC – why never in Ireland?
A balanced debate is not one that pushes just one viewpoint and it certainly is not liberal to terminate so many lives. To call for the extension of such practices in such a one-sided way is distorting the meaning of the word “rights”.
No mother’s life should ever be endangered. At the same time, surely we can agree that the unborn are not as disposable as paper tissue. These statistics indicate a practice that has gone way beyond “rights”.
Let’s be truly liberal and stand against this illiberal culture. – Yours, etc,
GAY MITCHELL MEP,
European Parliament,
Brussels,
Belgium.