Sometimes it feels as though the signs that our civilization is in decline are everywhere. Thanks to the amplification of bad news every day of the week to our phone screens, the sense that the West is falling apart has taken root. The opposite of the key virtues like moderation, justice, and wisdom, are encouraged in abundance. I am adamant that the decline we are seeing is due in a large part to moral decay.
This decay is everywhere, from the booming business of Only Fans, to our nearest neighbour Great Britain voting last week to drop the criminalisation of full-term abortion, and vote for the euthanasia of the frail and the sick. It seems as though we are willing our own destruction.
And on Tuesday morning, a lighthearted interview about having an abortion broadcast on Ireland AM just felt like another sign of the times. In the clip, you can watch as the guest and presenters smile and laugh about an issue which really, let’s face it, isn’t a laughing matter:
Comedian Katie Boyle was on the early morning chat show sofa to share “her abortion experience in the U.S., highlighting the lack of education around reproductive health and how she’s using comedy to break the stigma.”
What stigma? The Irish media has been favourably and sympathetically highlighting women who want to “shout your abortion” since I was a teenager. Ireland AM’s laugh-along at abortion wasn’t brave or bold – it was pathetic but also disgusting, and more and more women like Boyle now want us to laugh about their abortion experiences.
After a litany of broken promises by a Repeal the Eighth Campaign which promised restrictions and made the ludicrous claim that repealing the eighth would not lead to higher abortion rates, here we are, over 50,000 abortions later.
Yet, rather than having a serious conversation – about things like troubling and devastating cases of misdiagnosis, rocketing abortion rates, doctors getting sick in corridors after performing late-term abortions, or babies being born alive after failed abortions, all of which is happening – this is what is served up by Ireland AM. We get laughter, joviality and bad taste from a broadcaster in receipt of State funds. It honestly is quite disgusting, and deserves to be called out.
Worst of all was that the presenters, Tommy Bowe and Muireann O’Connell, were laughing along. I doubt that very many people would find it funny. It was all hugely insensitive.
Ms Boyle started off with the absurd but tired trope of St. Brigid being an abortionist. Unsurprisingly, this complete and utter nonsense went totally unchallenged.
“When I talked about St. Brigid – and I use her to advocate for abortion, I always have – because she gave the first documented abortion in Ireland. Which then the Catholics call a miracle,” the comedian chimed. At this point, Muireann O’Connell nodded her head in agreement. The presenter then continues to laugh as Boyle talks about abortion being “a miracle.”
“I love the Christianisation of that,” she continues. “So in the show, I talk about how we can just say instead of ‘I went for an abortion,’ I went for a miracle.”
At this point, O’Connell can hardly control her laughter – covering her mouth as she chuckles.
“But I never knew I ever would actually have to go through it myself, especially at 34 – in Trump’s America. Like, it’s so crazy.”
Tommy Bowe then asks the guest to spill all on the harrowing – but somehow, funny? – experience in big, bad Trump’s America, almost as though she’d just stepped off a plane fresh from North Korea. The female comedian then went on to detail how she met a gynaecologist, who told her that they would “figure it out” adding: “I didn’t know they put you to sleep. I didn’t know the medication they give you – which then I accidentally overdosed on because I didn’t know it was serious pain medication.”
“So like the whole steps, there was no education. And the whole steps that got me into that situation, there was no education. Because I thought – I took the morning after pill – I thought that was like a nuclear bomb. I thought that if they did a movie about it, you know the guy who created it, they’d have Cillian Murphy.”
“It’s Oppenheimer, totally,” O’Connell added.
The breakfast show audience then had to hear the wonders of turning abortion into comedy for people to laugh at.
“People are going to have their judgements,” Muireann O’Connell said. But Katie Boyle shrugs it off: “I do think after this, I’ll get loads of hate, but I’ve been getting hate for years.”
“I was thinking about it when I was getting the abortion – I was thinking why do I feel bad about this?” She comes to the conclusion: “I only feel bad about the idea of people being mean to me. But if they’re going to be mean to me, we don’t agree. We don’t have the same morals, so what does it matter what they say about me.”
This is the thing though. It’s not about hate, or hating anyone. To shrug off any form of scrutiny as being blind hate is a lazy way of avoiding real questions and important conversations. People are allowed to take moral stances – including that ending the life of an unborn child is wrong. That is a legitimate position – one that is constantly delegitimised by our media.
The implication is that those among us who don’t find it funny when you detail your abortion are somehow the ones who are mean and hateful. They are the minority voices who need to be silenced. It’s never been clearer that abortion activists own the media, the political class, the culture. We’re at a point where we laugh mockingly about abortion on morning television, yet people like Boyle keep up the pretence that a minority voice is holding them back. It’s always the ‘haters’ in the comments who are to blame – and not the oppression that is of your own making.
Boyle is not the only one making her abortion into comedy material. In the last five years or so, TikToks have started popping up here, there and everywhere of girls giggling, sometimes laughing hysterically, as they head in to get abortions. One video I distinctly remember from a few years ago – and there have been more since – showed a young woman literally laughing as an ultrasound of a baby is shown. While pages of pro-life groups are restricted, TikTok openly allows this kind of content. These types of videos have tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of likes.
British comedian Grace Campbell, daughter of Labour politician Alistair Campbell, in her show ‘Grace Campbell Is On Heat’, performed at the Edinburgh fringe festival last year, also spoke about her abortion. Weeks before, she had recounted in a piece in the Guardian how “I thought if I could make the doctor laugh, then my abortion will be ok.”
Campbell, talking about discussing her abortion on stage, said:“It is also funny. Abortion is really hard to talk about, and very conflicting. And people don’t know if they’re allowed to laugh. So what I’m trying to do is show that in the moments I’m letting you laugh, you laugh.”
Others, like Jewish comedian Alison Leiby have done the same, to much praise. Then there was the disturbing play “All aboard! At Termination Station” shown at Edinburgh fringe festival a couple of summers ago. Comedians turning their attention to abortion signals that the consensus has shifted – from abortion being a necessary evil, something which should be “safe, legal and rare” to being a jolly good thing. How did that happen? Remember how “no one celebrates abortion?”
But when you read the experience of Grace Campbell, it’s very clear that her experience was traumatic and awful. In an op-ed in the Guardian, she details “weeks and weeks” of bleeding that she said she hadn’t been warned about. Seeing the baby on an ultrasound before he or she was aborted, she says, provided “a photographic memory for a grief I didn’t know I could feel, a grief for something I never knew, but something I know I would have loved very much.”
“And that every time that image would flash into my head for months to come, I’d burst into tears like a child who’d tripped and wanted their mum,” she penned.
All the girl power anthems and sanitised language will not make abortion a more pleasant experience, or a less serious thing. Recent studies have shown that in reality, grief can be a more common response than relief for women who undergo abortion. Depression, feelings of loss, shame, and guilt are all recognised as known reactions to abortion. It is no small thing to terminate the life of your own child. Downplaying and making fun of something so serious, and often so tragic, is as disempowering as it gets. I find it incredible that many of the same people who can talk so seriously about pregnancy loss and miscarriage can, on the other hand, laugh about abortion.
There’s something deeply worrying and self-destructive about platforming and encouraging humour around abortion – and those who host primetime-slot breakfast shows to have a good laugh about the killing of an unborn baby actually aren’t funny at all.