A chara, - The gross distortion of statistics used as the premise for the assertion of Ivana Bacik and her colleagues in Women on Waves (June 25th) that the women of Ireland need abortion to be legalised betrays either a stunning lack of understanding or a massively disingenuous misrepresentation.
The suggestion that "79 per cent of people favour the legalisation of abortion in certain circumstances" is made on the basis of the summation of various options posed in one recent opinion poll. However, it is highly probable that if the liberal abortion regime favoured by this group were put to the people, it would be heavily defeated. This is irrelevant anyway as, amazingly, the professor of law (of all things) believes a referendum - surely the purest form of democracy - to be "futile", while on the other hand she relies on the glaring evidence of "changing public opinion" (which apparently can be measured via selective opinion polls) and the supremely accurate method of adding up the number of phone calls to their organisation in the past week (unpublished, by the way). .
One might be forgiven for wondering what she and her colleagues are actually afraid of - particularly in view of the other recent poll (ignored by them, strangely enough) showing a large majority in favour of holding such a referendum. Or just who exactly do they think they are fooling? - Is mise,
David Carroll, Castle Gate, Dublin 2.