Sir, - I wish to respond to Medb Ruane's response to my questions regarding the qualitative differences between a 10-week-old foetus and a 24-week-old foetus (Opinion, August 4th). Her argument seems to be that one looks human and feels pain while the other lacks human features and is presumed not to feel pain. The logical outcome of this argument is that any living thing can be destroyed at will, provided we can presume that it does not feel much pain. The consequences of this argument would be unacceptable to any civilised society.
Ms Ruane makes many other statements in her article which can be questioned on the basis of medical research and practice.
She asserts that at 12 weeks' gestation the baby's sex cannot be distinguished by scan. This is not the case; in fact female foetuses are being aborted in India on the basis of a scan at 12 weeks' gestation.
She claims that a woman's chances of dying from an early abortion are 15 times less than from childbirth. This may be true in other jurisdictions but Ireland has the best record in the world for maternal care, with two deaths per 100,000 births (World Health Organisation, 1993). This record is very significant since, without access to abortion, all the difficult medical cases have to be dealt with.
She writes that the foetus may respond in a mechanical way but cannot see, hear, breathe or experience physical sensation. Medical research is currently disproving this theory. Studies from Queen's University Belfast have shown that by 16 weeks' gestation the foetus recognises and responds to its parents' voices and other familiar sounds. It has long been established that by five weeks' gestation the foetus begins to respond to stimuli and by nine weeks can curl its fist around an object. By 13 weeks it is already swallowing the amniotic fluid and passing it out as urine and expresses preference if the fluid is sweetened or soured (The First Year of Life by H.B. Valman and J.F. Pearson and The Tiniest Humans, by Dr Liley).
One may forgive Ms Ruane for not being aware of the medical research with regard to the development of the foetus but her final assertion that the legalisation of abortion in England did not give rise to a huge increase in the abortion rate there is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts as published by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys in England. The published figures state that in 1968 (the first year of legalised abortion) the number of women who had abortions in England was 23,641. In 1969 this number rose to 54,819 and rose every following year until in 1989 it had peaked at 183,974 abortions. Between 1989 and 2000 the average numbers of abortions per year has remained around 170,000+. Put another way, this means that in 1969, 6 per cent of conceptions ended in abortion and by 1988 20 per cent of all conceptions were ending in abortions. There is not a shred of evidence to support her assertion that, after a rise in the abortion rate for the first five years after legislation, there was a fall thereafter. - Yours, etc.,
Julia Heffernan, PRO, Life Ireland, Patrick Street, Cork.