Madam, - Patsy McGarry invokes a combination of "science" and St Thomas Aquinas to support his claim that the detection of brain activity could be accepted as the beginning of human life (Rite and Reason, October 9th).
I taught embryology for several years before beginning to work as a doctor in obstetrics and gynaecology, and it never occurred to me then that anyone could think of life beginning other than at conception. From this beginning the little human being develops in a most wonderful and still little-understood way and he or she is certainly alive in any ordinary use of the word.
Yet "life", according to Patsy McGarry, can be accepted as not having begun until brain activity can be shown. According to your columnist, "you might say" that this "could be taken as" the time of quickening, i.e. 16 weeks into the pregnancy.
"You might say" and "could be taken as" appear to be useful phrases for making an absurd remark sound reasonable. "It could be argued that" is another phrase employed by Mr McGarry to imply that scientists, thinking on the beginnings of human life, would also "be more at ease" with this old idea of quickening being the beginning of human life. In fact he preferred the abstract phrase "current scientific thinking" to the word scientists. I am sorry to read such sloppy writing in The Irish Times.
This article demonstrates the danger of using abstract words.Adjectives force writers to be clear - and the word "alive" is much better than the word "life". "Alive" has to be applied to something real, in this case an embryo, and we do not find ourselves floating away in a cloud of abstraction. - Yours, etc,
ALISTAIR McFARLANE, Cambellstown, Letterkenny, Co Donegal.