Sir, – Let's be clear that when Breda O'Brien (Opinion: "It's time we provide couples with perinatal hospices") and other anti-abortion campaigners suggest perinatal hospice care, which in itself is an entirely good idea, they are not suggesting it as an option alongside termination, but as the only option.
Ms O’Brien can couch her arguments in a language of care and compassion, but beneath it all is the basic anti-abortion position: live birth at all costs, regardless of the wishes of the pregnant person.
Ms O’Brien contends that certain medical terms are “cruel”, even “ugly and discriminatory”.
I would sooner argue that the cases themselves and the way the State deals with them are cruel, ugly and discriminatory.
She also implies that medical professionals are prompting or even coercing their patients into terminating when they don’t want to.
Such unfounded accusations are an insult to medical staff dealing with these difficult cases.
Ms O’Brien asserts that no one can predict how “life-limiting” these conditions can be. On this point, with respect to Ms O’Brien, I would trust a medic over a media commentator. Medics might not be able to pinpoint exactly in some cases the precise hour of probable death, but appealing to exceptional cases of newborns defying medical prognoses to justify denying the option of termination to devastated couples is a fallacy.
Further, to suggest, as Ms O’Brien does, that doctors who engage in consultation with their patients about termination as a possible option are giving “the impression that their child’s short life is so worthless that it is best to end it even earlier” is an insult in this case to both doctors and the couples facing fatal fetal abnormality diagnoses every week.
Her hunch about the lack of compassion of doctors in these cases is contradicted by the brave women of the lobby group, Terminations for Medical Reasons, all of whom I have heard have said that the medical team around them acted with care and understanding – in so far as the law allows them to.
Breda O’Brien is against therapeutic abortion in every circumstance. We get it. I just wish she would leave women, families and their doctors in these painful circumstances alone. – Yours, etc, JOYCE WILSON Cambridge, England.