Madam, - Your paper is to be congratulated on commemorating the 40th Anniversary of Humanae Vitae. However, Patsy McGarry's article of July 25th was a very negative appraisal indeed of Pope Paul VI and of this controversial encyclical.
Undoubtedly, many of the dissident priests and bishops whom Mr McGarry mentioned acted out of a spirit of compassion. However, not all the effects of the pill are to the advantage of women or of society in general. As Pope Paul said in Humanae Vitae, "A man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman and. . .reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires".
Women on the pill are in fact, in a state of chemical castration. The World Health Organisation accepts that they run an increased risk of certain diseases. The pill can, directly or indirectly, be a cause of infertility, which can cause much heartache especially to women. The pill can also cause congenital abnormalities, including Down's Syndrome, in offspring of women under 40.
There have also been adverse social effects of contraceptive usage. Between 1961 and 1996, divorce rates in the EU 15 increased threefold. In the UK they increased more than sevenfold. The pill has to take much of the blame for this. It leads to infidelity (as Pope Paul predicted it would), a major cause of marital breakdown. A survey of couples in the US using natural family planning found a divorce rate of less than 5 per cent, where the overall rate is 50 per cent.
Since 1979, when the Family Planning Bill was passed in the Dáil, abortion rates, extramarital pregnancy rates and the rate of sexual crimes have risen in Ireland. The number of girls becoming pregnant while under the age of consent more than quadrupled between the 1950s and the present. The number of births has fallen steadily year by year: in 1979 there were 72,000 births; in 1994 there were only 54,000. Garret FitzGerald, in an article in your paper some time ago, ascribed some of the success of the Irish economy in recent years to the baby boom of the 1970s.
Sexually transmitted diseases have sharply increased. And now taxpayers are being asked to pay for an expensive vaccine to counteract one of the side-effects of one such STI. What they have not been told is that invasive cervical cancer can be a manifestation of Aids.
There is also concern about the environmental effects of the pill. The pill and other endocrine-disrupting compounds (EDCs) are blamed for the fall in sperm counts among men in the Western world. In parts of the Arctic, more than twice as many female infants as males are born due to the same factor. Fish and animals have similarly been affected.
In an interview given before being made Pope, and recorded in a very fine book called Salt of the Earth,on being questioned about the drop in vocations to the priesthood, Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out that some of it was due, quite simply, to the fall in size of Catholic families.
I recently met a young doctor who told me she had given up the practice of medicine because she could not train as a GP without prescribing the pill. And we complain that doctors today have lost the idealism and sense of vocation of older members of the profession.
"By their fruits you shall know them"; and the fruits of the contraceptive revolution have by no means been all good. - Yours, etc,
Dr HELEN T. O'BRIEN,
Booterstown,
Co Dublin.