Madam, - Kevin O'Reilly (October 23rd) provides a weak philosophical argument for maintaining Irish marriage exclusively for male-female pairings. He contends that the possibility of reproduction is a requisite for marriage and, in seeking to do away with the fly in the ointment that is infertile couples, he states that women who have been deemed infertile by physicians have, on rare occasions, "miraculously" conceived. Thus, to deny them marriage would be short-sighted, since we do not know for certain that reproduction will never occur.
Should, then, a woman who has had her uterus entirely removed be denied the right to marry a man? Pregnancy would be a physical impossibility for such an unfortunate woman. But perhaps Mr O'Reilly believes that a "miraculous" conception is still possible in such a situation. - Yours, etc,
IAN KELLEHER,
Beresford Street,
Dublin 7.