The country, it is plain to see, is not currently in a good state. Housing seems irredeemably stuck, a €500 million hole has appeared in the Education Budget, the Children’s Hospital has now become a running joke, Tusla is failing in the worst way possible in caring for vulnerable and at-risk kids, and we’re all now terrified of the cost of the weekly shop.
In addition to that our young people are emigrating in their droves, and our birth rate is on the floor: both harbingers of doom in terms of economic growth, and healthcare provision, and innovation, and the ability to pay pensions, and just about everything we need to sustain our future.
Our abortion rate, a metric of failure and despair, is also spiralling, with almost 11,000 abortions in 2024 and an estimate of more than 60,000 abortions since the procedure was legalised in 2019. The numbers are staggering. We are literally aborting our future. But to prove that some imbecilic ideology can always make things worse, along comes the Social Democrats who, it seems, just can’t get enough abortion.
Most people with a brain – and a heart – who observe the persistent, rapid increases in the number of abortions being carried out start to feel some unease. How can it be that a procedure that the electorate were promised would be ‘rare’, and subject to restrictions, is now performed 11,000 times per year? We’re seeing almost a tripling of the 2018 abortion rate, even allowing for a generous estimate of abortion pills being imported at that time. Shouldn’t that lead to some scrutiny?
The establishment media are well aware, of course, that a focus on this disturbing increase would lead to some public disquiet. So the massive jump in numbers – from under 3,000 women travelling for abortions in 2018, to almost 11,000 obtaining abortions in Ireland in 2024 – is consistently under-reported. Instead, there’s a choreographed pretence that our abortion laws actually need to be liberalised further, while the data, the facts, the horror stories that have emerged, and the soaring rate of deaths, are all simply ignored and swept under the carpet. It’s bias by avoidance: the Irish media are particularly skilled at that evasion tactic, and not only in relation to abortion.
That’s why, as expected, the latest abortion pushes from Holly Cairns and Ruth Coppinger et al received such favourable, sympathetic, fawning coverage. Their absurd, cliched claims about Ireland’s already grotesquely liberal abortion laws needing further liberalisation are never seriously challenged, just as the Marie O’Shea abortion review with its predictable outcome was never questioned.
Cairns, for example, continues to use the misleading term ‘fatal fetal abnormality’ as a basis for a change in the law, when experts and peer-reviewed papers have concluded that it is not a medical term.
The meticulous data kept by the DoH in England and Wales shows that the number of women travelling for abortion from Ireland after a diagnosis of a life-limiting condition such as anencephaly and Trisomy 18 have collapsed since Repeal – because those abortions are now being carried out in Ireland. These figures are easily obtained and verified. Why can’t the media do their job – and if abortion supporters actually want abortion legalised on disability grounds, why are they upfront about that motivation?
Why isn’t Holly Cairns asking about a review into the kind of mentality that has taken over our maternity services at the highest level and which led to a perfectly healthy unborn child – Baby Christopher – being aborted after a mistaken diagnosis. Why is no-one questioning if a rush to abortion has now become the basis of ‘choice’?
Is she at all interested in the fact that a woman who had taken prescribed abortion pills, but was not given an ultrasound as that is not required under the current regulations, later presented with a life-threatening ruptured ectopic pregnancy in Maternity Hospital Limerick. Has she met with the doctors who warned that the practice of not providing an ultrasound in medical abortion could be fatal where it was not understood that ectopic pregnancy was involved. A woman almost died. Again, most of the media and the TDs in the Dáil ignored that inconvenient outcome of Repeal.
Similarly, we are subjected to nonsense being bandied about in regard to the 3-day wait. Figures obtained by Carol Nolan TD and Peadar Tóibin TD clearly show that thousands of women since 2019 did not return for an abortion after the 3-day period of reflection. How can that be a bad thing? Surely every decent person would prefer that fewer abortions took place? How many abortions do the ghastly SocDems and the Socialists want? An unlimited number? Can RTÉ ask those questions please?
The media almost completely ignored the statement made by 100 healthcare professionals who argued that the 3-day wait gave women time to think – in the same way that they ignored the astounding moment in the Abortion Review Oireachtas Health Committee hearing where it was acknowledged that the Review never sought to speak to any one of those thousands of women who had, in fact, changed their mind.
The SocDems, like their mirror images in the Labour Party, like to think of themselves as the most compassionate people in Ireland – but their compassion is extraordinarily selective.
These are the kind of people whose lips quiver at the mere thought of hurty words but who have zero compassion for the most defenceless and vulnerable in our society, preborn children. You’ll be familiar with the type: they claim local fuel protesters are sinister, but think its compassion for the HSE to tell women to flush the bodies of their aborted unborn baby down the toilet.
They believe unwoke thoughts and ‘hate speech’ (which is just shorthand for opinions they don’t like’ should be illegal – and definitely support jailing pro-lifers for silently praying – but then claim that any restrictions on abortion are cruel and inhumane. These are the sensitive souls who wail constantly about being offended, but have no objection to abortion on demand to 6 months.
Holly Cairns bizarrely tweeted in 2013 that for every minute of reporting given to the papal conclave that was then taking place. Quite the comedian.
There are no passionate, emotional pleas from Cairns in regard to the 108 babies who survived abortion between 2019 and 2023. There are no votes to be gleaned from dead babies, I suppose. At this stage, these people are obscene.
This can seem like a case of cognitive dissonance: as if the inherent and obvious contradictions are happening at a subconscious level. But the complete indifference to the rights of the child being destroyed through all nine months of pregnancy – which is the actual pro-choice position – seems very deliberate. It’s easy to position oneself as the champion of women while trampling on the rights of the tens of thousands of preborn girls and boys who can never hold you to account. And telling women in crisis that you’re ‘pro-choice’ is simply a way of letting them know they are on their own.
The stark lack of consideration for a tiny human who cannot raise their voice, or even their eyes, in their own defence, is evident. It’s the law of the jungle. Might is right. Those without a voice can be killed with impunity. Killing is dressed up as compassion. Women who regret abortion are ignored or ridiculed.
All the emotional pitches and the soft bleating doesn’t change the cruelty of that reality. One may “smile and smile and be a villain, as the Bard said. But nature has its own way of biting back. The sections of our society most committed to abortion, including the SocDems, are aborting their own future, and doing so with gusto. Sooner than we may have previously thought, a different generation will reverse this cruel and selfish abortion law.