From civilisation to barbarism

■ Recently the Minister for Health, Simon Harris, said: “It is important to remember that the referendum must be passed, and the Eighth Amendment repealed, if anything is to change for Irish women.

“I believe that, as people reflect on the situation in Ireland, where women are forced abroad to have a termination, where women are purchasing abortion pills unsafely online, where women in extremely difficult situations are left isolated and neglected, that Irish people will vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment.”

My own opinion is that this represents – at best – a total lack of imagination and creative thinking: in most cases, “women are forced to have a termination” only as a result of poverty and other pressures.

These could easily be alleviated by a truly compassionate Government loosening its purse strings to aid “women in extremely difficult situations”.

The Government should seek to give the utmost support, encouragement and publicity to various practical alternatives to abortion, such as adoption.

Adoption is a real alternative: large numbers of childless couples are crying out for a child to adopt only to find there is a shortage of available children.

The first Government in modern Europe to legalise abortion appears to have been the brutal dictatorship of the Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

The widespread availability of abortion in the West today also seems to be symptomatic of an increasingly rapid descent from civilisation into barbarism. R Seathrún Mac Éin Sandymount, Dublin 4