The ‘Trojan Horse’ used by pro-abortion groups to further their demands for abortion on demand is that it is unfair that pregnant mums should have to continue with pregnancies in which the child has been identified as ‘not fit for life’, in other words having a life-limiting condition. The abortion lobby has come up with the awful term ‘fatal foetal abnormality’ which does not appear in recognised medical textbooks. Unfortunately the impression that such a medical diagnosis exists is strongly reinforced by a large number of our media commentators as well as Sinn Féin and the Alliance Party. This strategy for introducing abortion on demand sounds very similar to those arguments that I well remember prior to the introduction of the 1967 Abortion Act in Great Britain. The justification then was that women were dying through illegal ‘back street’ abortions and the solution to this was to legalise abortion. We all know that within a short time approximately 200,000 babies were being aborted every year.
Carrying a child that is identified as having a life-limiting condition has to be one of the most distressing experiences that any woman can have. Anyone with a grain of humanity can only have the deepest compassion for that woman. I grew up in a family with a seriously handicapped brother and I remember well the impact that experience had on my family and my mother in particular. I know, however, that my mother even if she had prior knowledge of her son’s disability would never have chosen to have her unborn child murdered.
I hope that as soon as possible women identified as pregnant with children with life-limiting conditions are afforded proper support and assistance as opposed to the current default position of killing the
unborn child.
People in the southern part of our island need to think very carefully in the coming referendum because it is this issue in particular which will be used in an attempt to remove the protection the Irish Constitution affords to all our children. I do not believe that Ireland, north or south should go down the road of a kind of quality control system in which those children deemed not suitable for life are removed (murdered) such as already exists in Iceland regarding children with Downs Syndrome. Such an option would undoubtedly place great pressure on mums expecting babies with disabilities to abort them. The best way of preventing such an outcome is to cherish all our children equally.
EAMON DALLETT
Dungiven, Co Derry
Einstein had Stormont in mind when postulating
An educated guess would be that Einstein never visited our wee province, otherwise he would never had uttered the memorable line that doing something over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. If he stuck around he could have repeatedly tested another theory under controlled conditions in Stormont and gain enough data from an established pattern to put forward a provisional explanation to disprove and abandon what had previously been the established scientific certainty – evolution.
Text books will tell us government exists to create and enforce the laws that protect the rights and lives of citizens and discouraging crime by punishing delinquents. Without government, people would be less likely to respect contracts and agreements due to the lack of an objective way to settle disputes. Government serves as an arbiter between disagreeing parties. This is, theoretically speaking of course, but what if the delinquents and the disagreeable parties are the government?
What if you have an electorate conditioned to a mindless endgame where the aim dictates our rationale for voting, namely – if no-one wins then no-one loses? And to that aim we assign legitimacy on and authority for, a failure to deliver governance on our behalf. We guarantee a system that sees the self-interests of the self-serving being pursued and achieved; while our services and our infrastructure remain in states of paralysis and decay. Yet it appears to be a price worth paying as long as the ‘other lot’ do not gain.
Even though he may not have visited here Einstein must have had us in mind when he postulated: ‘there are two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the former’.
LAURENCE TODD
Belfast BT15
Partition made a sick nation sicker
Trevor Ringland’s letter, ‘Wrong to attribute all Ireland’s problems to the English’ (January 11), is a fair comment on our problematic island. Generally he is quite right to point out that Ireland’s difficulties can’t be totally laid at the door of the English. Yet Mr Ringland minimises the English impact on our country.
The English underestimated the depth of the sectarianism that existed prior to and after partition. Mr Ringland, and former Special Branch man Dr Matchett wrongly ascribe the loyalist murdering of Catholics to republicans. That is simplistic in the extreme.
That aside I agree with Mr Ringland who quotes Carson in saying that “nationalists (have to) woo unionists into a united Ireland. I may be wrong here but I understand that Carson was no advocate of partition.
Partition made a sick nation sicker. We have ended up with a legacy of discrimination, bigotry and murder on all sides. In the 26 counties we are seeing inept parochial politics, not to forget a blindness about solving the legacy of partition.
Mr Ringland quotes Robert Lloyd Praeger who talked about he absence of citizens living in peace with each other. A start would be if unionists accepted the integrity of the republican case. Not just the letter but in spirit.
MANUS McDAID
Derry City
Stormont vitriol
We all hoped that it had gone but the vitriol at Stormont was just hidden for a while. The real issues is not an election but the consequences which will follow it.
The last few weeks have surely exposed what a rag bag of MLAs the Northern Ireland electorate are represented by and any statements they have uttered were never more than perfunctory. Their infantile behaviour over the last few months has been beset by a heating scandal, intransigence, bloody mindedness, acts of contrition on television, complaints about union flags on potato bags and crass ridicule of the Irish language.
It beggars belief how these people ever considered themselves fit for public life. The election is an opportunity for them to resign and take up a new line of work, but history suggests a return to the miserable status quo.
WILSON BURGESS
Derry City
A spectacle of failure
The picture presented by the DUP and SF, as they emerged from Stormont last Monday, may best be described as pathetic.
The DUP arrogant, sullen, obstinate; Sinn Féin arrogant, self-righteous, indignant, bearing the crown of the martyr.
It represented, above all, a spectacle of failure.
Ten years ago at St Andrews the British government handed them both an unrivalled platform for electoral success as it diluted the Good Friday Agreement and proffered us Paisley and McGuinness as champions of political stability, peace and reconciliation.
Today the evidence points only to failure, frustration of our hopes and manifest irreconcilability.
These parties, who have ‘given us the worst of the past’ – extreme unionism and extreme nationalism – -can not be expected to give us ‘the best of the future.’
They appear both unwilling and incapable of doing so.
JOE McBRIDE
Maghera, Co Derry
