Sir, – Maria Steen believes "our own Government is pumping millions into schemes to dissuade people from having children" ("A society that sees children as a burden is sick", Opinion & Analysis, August 15th).
This deliberately conflates programmes that seek to prevent unwanted or unintended pregnancies, enhance women’s reproductive rights and promote their reproductive health with some sort of state-sponsored, dystopian, population-control scheme. Not all pregnancies are wanted and should not be made to seem so just because reproductive rates are falling across the developed world.
Such pro-natalism risks depicting women as mere baby-making machines, and those who do not have, or do not want, children as abnormal. – Yours, etc,
ELAINE MULLAN,
Portlaw,
Co Waterford .