Sir, Is Professor Eamon O'Dwyer seriously concerned about abortion? If so, ordinary common sense - never mind his consultant's qualifications - should tell him that neither politics nor law can solve a medical problem.
Whatever else it is, abortion is a female medical matter. Thousands of women are travelling to British and Continental clinics for abortions. It is a sad and serious matter. Why is it happening? It is happening because women who should not be pregnant in the first place either do not know about or cannot easily get contraception, sterilisation or adequate medical information. It is happening because the Opus Dei organisation and its friends have made a blowing horn of the abortion option throughout the length and breath of Ireland.
No sane person could approve of elective abortion as an acceptable, routine part of family planning. The trouble in Ireland is that the small group of consultant obstetrics making the most noise about abortion, the most demands for the daft business of running yet another referendum, is the very group, man for man, which fought the provision of medically necessary contraception services. They should have the decency to leave abortion protests to the doctors who cared enough to provide services to prevent it.
No reasonable person objects to a rural TD insisting that a change in the Constitution will solve the whole problem. But it is a bit much to accept the same political credulity from a professor of obstetrics. - Yours, etc..
Abbeyfield House,
Wicklow Town.