As I was abroad, I missed reading Klaus Vella Bardon’s piece ‘Getting facts right’ (June 11), responding to my letter, ‘Untie doctors’ hands’ (June 5), unjustifiably making various accusations.

I was not “eager to praise [Martin] Scicluna’s pro-abortion article”, to share his (alleged) “enthusiasm to abort babies”, nor am I guilty of having “their blood” on my conscience. These are serious allegations, a ‘knee-jerk’ reaction, and make me wonder whether Vella Bardon actually read beyond my first paragraph.

I had described Scicluna’s article ‘Pro-choice Irish’ (May 30) as “fair and balanced” but criticised him for omitting the case of Savita Halappanavar.

In response, Vella Bardon (a dentist and so, should know better) quotes unqualified Iona Institute director David Quinn (who has a business degree and had himself founded the Iona Institute): “In truth, Mrs Halappanavar’s medical team decided to let her miscarriage follow its natural course, as is common in such cases, because they did not think her life was in danger. Sadly, her medical team did not spot on time that she was developing a deadly infection: sepsis… the law was not the issue… Later investigations listed a host of signs of a developing infection that her medical team missed. It was a case of bad medical practice, not a law hostile to the lives of women.”

I had quoted Sir Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, who is exceptionally well qualified and who backed the repeal of the clause because it “tied doctors’ hands”.

His report stated that medical staff had concluded that a miscarriage was inevitable but, despite repeated requests from Halappanavar and her husband for an abortion, they did not intervene as a foetal heartbeat could still be detected. A few days later, she miscarried, rupturing membranes and then dying from septic shock.

An inquest jury returned a unanimous verdict of medical misadventure and an independent inquiry found there hadbeen an “overemphasis on the need not to intervene until the foetal heart had stopped” as well as “poor patient monitoring and risk assessment”.

Thus, there is agreement that there was “poor patient monitoring and risk assessment” but, even so, the law was an important issue: it tied the doctors’ hands and almost certainly hampered and influenced their decisions.