Unborn babies fully deserve the right to life

APPOINTED as I am as a chaplain in a Catholic secondary school, I have been assigned to care for our pupils’ spiritual and moral well-being to the best of my ability, and so I feel it is my duty to respond to Colette Browne’s venting of spleen in favour of abortion (Opinion, Dec 14).

She seems to take joy in the fact that 6,000 women from Ireland last year had abortions in England. In this country we rightly worry about a far smaller number (over 200) of annual road deaths, and deaths by suicide (over 500), each of which is a tragedy.

Should we not also be worried and upset about the 6,000 or more deaths through abortion? The American people lost almost 3,000 living souls in the 9/11 attacks.

They lost nearly 4,500 soldiers in Iraq and are left mourning their dead. Yet Ms Browne can crow about the fact of these thousands of deaths through abortion (she estimates more than 100,000 Irish babies have been destroyed in the last 20 years), and asks that the process be made even easier and cheaper.

Just as the Americans seem oblivious to their estimate of 100,000 Iraqi dead, and seem to regard them as less than fully human and less deserving of life than themselves, so Browne seems to regard unborn Irish human beings as less than fully human and less deserving of the human right to life than herself.

Br Jeremy OFM Capuchin

Capuchin Friary

Fr Mathew Quay

Cork