Madam, - Fr Seamus Murphy SJ and Dr Kevin E O'Reilly of the Milltown Institute (March 28th) accuse two members of Doctors For Choice of abusing language in the manner of the Nazi pursuit of the Aryan ideal. This kind of debating manoeuvre hardly helps address the substantive issue.
The doctors were right to point out that Ireland is in a similar position to Poland with regard to the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Alicja Tysiac. An Irish woman whose pregnancy imperils her health might well succeed in having the court rule that the Irish State infringes her human rights by not having an effective legal framework for abortion on medical grounds.
I feel that inappropriate references to Hitler's Germany are mistaken on at least two grounds. Not only do they invariably fail to advance any debate, they also tend to belittle the actual experience of fascism.
And the reference to the Nazis here is inappropriate, not least because legislation of May 26th, 1933, banned abortion in Germany. Two years later doctors and midwives were obliged to notify the police of every miscarriage, with all such cases being investigated in order to convict women found to have had abortions.
By 1938, 7,000 women a year were being imprisoned in Germany for having had abortions. In 1943, Hitler's government introduced and implemented the death penalty for abortion in Germany.
It is very unfair, therefore, to associate supporters of Doctors For Choice with fascism. - Yours, etc,
Dr CONOR KOSTICK, School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity College, Dublin 2.