Dear Editor, The measure of how just, how equal, we are as a society is surely how we care for the most vulnerable among us. How should we apply this measure to the proposal being pushed by most media since the election, the repeal of the Eighth Amendment?
It’s pretty odd that people want a referendum to take away a basic right from the most vulnerable lives in our society. Referendums should give us rights, not take them away.
Difficult situations are highlighted by those who are pushing to repeal the Eighth Amendment to clear the way for abortion on even wider grounds. As they keep telling us, abortion is the pièce de résistance in Ireland becoming progressive.
But in The Joy of the Gospel Pope Francis draws a very clear line in the sand: “It is not ‘progressive’ to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.”
And Pope Francis makes an undeniable point when he says unborn children are “the most defenceless and innocent among us”. What he says next describes exactly what the repeal of Eighth campaign is seeking to do: “Nowadays efforts are made to deny them their human dignity and to do with them whatever one pleases, taking their lives and passing laws preventing anyone from standing in the way of this.”
But I think his deepest point, and his gravest warning, lies in how he points out that the defence of unborn life “is closely linked to the defence of each and every other human life. It involves the conviction that a human being is always sacred and inviolable, in any situation and at every stage of development. Human beings are ends in themselves and never a means of resolving other problems.”
If we make it legal to kill one class of human beings today, what is to stop others making laws to kill another class tomorrow?
Yours etc.,
Seán Ó Raghallaigh,
Monkstown, Co. Dublin.