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It is a cold day in hell when the leaders of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail come together to support a Sinn Fein legislative proposal. But that is what has happened as yet another protection for the unborn child is stripped away in the Irish statute books.
The proposal to remove the 3-day waiting period for expectant mothers who are opting for abortion is one of the final nails in the coffin to the already minimal contingent protections that the unborn child has.
Micheál Martin spoke ‘respectfully’ of the sincerely held views on both sides of the debate, before quickly discounting the views on only one side. As variously Taoiseach and Tánaiste, for what now feels like forever, Minister Martin has progressively found that his conscience has little time for the lives and rights of the unborn child. Simon Harris has moved far from his infamously famous promises to pro-life voters that he would stand up for the unborn child.
The trend of conscience evolving Taoisigh continues. Leo Varadkar found the same moral path. Enda Kenny struggled more than his successors but found his way. He evolved just as have most other politicians, from the expediency of defending the 8th amendment to the Constitution, to the expediency of eviscerating all that it stood for. Political expedience.
And many celebrated when it was removed. Some danced. It is possible to support abortion rights without dancing on the graves of the unborn. It is possible to appreciate that there are two lives at stake, and recognise the decision that is taken is to end one of them. But that second life is increasingly erased from the conversation.
Speaking in the Dáil, Mr Martin referred to this decision of the electorate in 2018 yet he failed to remember all the promises that were made as to what the legislation that was to follow the removal of the 8th would look like. Balanced. Limited. Safeguards. We were told.
It is already the case that the unborn child, up 12 weeks of gestation, has no more rights than (to put it crudely) the dead skin on the heel of my foot if it is not a wanted child. My baby-toe has more rights. The 3-day waiting period does not protect the child intrinsically, but at least recognised that there was some gravity to the decision being taken.
It is already the case that the unborn child, up 12 weeks of gestation, has less rights than a baby-toe. Voluntarily removing even the smallest of limbs would require greater medical inquiry. The child in the womb at thus gestation has no more rights than (to put it crudely) the dead skin on the heel of my foot, if it is not a “wanted” child. My baby-toe has more rights. The 3-day waiting period does not protect the child intrinsically but at least recognised that there was some gravity to the decision being taken.
No more so. The waiting period is an inconvenience. It is a delay. It has resulted in women changing their minds about having an abortion. That cannot be allowed in modern Ireland. Supporters of removing the 3-day wait say that any decision to abort has been given sufficient thought, yet HSE data shows that 10,000 women did not return to complete their abortion after the 3-day wait. That is likely 10,000 unborn children not killed.
Abortion has to be presented as simply healthcare. A right. Tropes are rolled out that no other healthcare decision requires a 3 day ‘cooling-off’ period – as if the decision is one of taking some curative medicine.
These are the conversations that are happening in Europe and globally. Abortion as a right. If abortion is a right that trumps the right to life of the unborn child, then that child has no rights at all.
The child’s existence is only contingent on whether it is wanted or not. If that logic were applied to a human being at any other stage of life, we would consider ourselves barbarians. The contention expressed on the Niall Boylan show by one abortion advocate that some children in care would have been better off aborted is – hopefully – not one widely held by the people responsible for Ireland’s children’s well-being.
Micheál Martin spoke of sincerely held views on both sides. I submit that it can be a sincerely held view that an adult woman’s rights are greater than the unborn child’s. I do not agree with those views, as they are both human lives that ought to be afforded protections, but I can accept them as sincerely held, even if wrong. But I accept others may not feel that way. But in a world of apparent universal, inalienable, human rights, the arbitrary distinction created by the magical birth canal does not stand up to scrutiny.
Abortion as a right is a preference. Arguments of personhood and things like that end up as arbitrary decision points for removing rights by the strong from the weak.
Spare me the arguments about abortion saving lives – that is well worn at this stage and our law prior to the removal of the 8th accommodated that – with the resultant messiness that comes about when healthcare works to treat two lives inextricably connected to each other. A tiny number of the abortions that take place in Ireland are for such life-death-health reasons in any case. The 3-day wait discussion is not relevant here.
We do not hear our government talk about the lives lost to abortion. Thousands and thousands of them. Nor the lives saved by the three-day waiting period. They didn’t even talk to any women who availed of the waiting period, changed their minds, and are forever grateful for it.
The arguments now are about one set of rights obliterating the humanity and rights of the unborn child. The refrain that abortion is merely healthcare for a woman is repeated and repeated until it is accepted as a truism. It goes unchallenged.
Abortion is not healthcare because pregnancy is not a sickness. Yet we are increasingly expected to believe that it is. The means by which our species reproduces itself is apparently a sickness. Our politicians repeat this ad nauseum. It is a mantra that is expected to become fact based on repetition.
Let’s call a spade a spade now. Advocates for abortion do not recognise (of if they do, they do not admit it) the humanity in the unborn child. The only rights afforded are if the child is a wanted child. If it is wanted, we coo over it because it is making the mother happy by its existence. If it isn’t wanted, then what is it? Something disposable, apparently.
How many babies were born alive and left to die after abortions in Ireland since the 8th was repealed? 108 in five years. If the image of a child in that situation does not generate some feeling between sympathy and abhorrence, I question what level of humanity we have left as a society. Meditate on the reality of what that is for one single child. Give it a minute and think of what that death feels like.
It happens behind closed doors. We don’t talk about it and we don’t want to do anything about it. Ireland has not changed. Just different victims.
Now, hearing talk of the unborn child as a human may be upsetting for some people. I understand that. But, this is my sincerely held view. I believe that refusing to give pain relief to a child as it is dying in the womb because you want to believe or tell yourself it doesn’t feel pain, or because it is possible it doesn’t, is destructive of our humanity.
I do not believe this is done out of a lack of humanity but to convince ourselves of the absence of humanity in the unborn child. We can’t allow ourselves to admit there might be pain involved. If there is pain, then there is a something alive. We don’t want to ask ourselves what that might be.
We close our eyes to the children born alive and left to die. We should admit that it happens and own the cruelty that comes with our culture of abortion now. If our abortion regime is compassion for women, own that, but own the side-effects as well.
As children who are diagnosed with a potential disability in the womb, we tell ourselves that they are better off not born, who are we really trying to convince? We say they will have a poor quality of life, whose quality of life is actually at stake?
Unwanted and unplanned pregnancies can be a shock. They can upset our plans of a curated life. The news that a child is not going to be perfect can completely turn our plans for life upside down. These challenges are not to be taken lightly but are they reason enough for society to erase the humanity of the unborn child and strip it of all rights and protections when it is not wanted?
We can admit that a diagnosis of a disability in the womb places mothers and parents in really difficult situations. We can admit that it is awfully hard and that the pain, fear and crisis are genuine without saying the only option is abortion. The government can choose to recognise the difficulties by putting real systems, processes and supports in place to make it manageable, to make it possible to carry the child and then give it up after birth. But it demonstrates a woeful incuriosity on the possibilities that exist as alternatives to abortion that very little is done to provide positive options.
It demonstrates a woeful incuriosity as to why abortions are happening. It doesn’t care or it doesn’t want to know. Abortion is now considered a morally neutral – or a morally positive – act in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of our elected representatives. Abortion advocates admit that a decision to abort is taken seriously by the mother, but they do not talk about why it is a serious decision.
No doubt there are further loosening of the laws coming down the line. Expanding access for abortions for disability reasons – babies falsely described as ‘incompatible with life’, or ‘fatal foetal abnormalities’ – will be the next step. The slippery slope has been embraced by the events of last week. We were told that the removal of the 8th would result in a restrictive abortion regime. We got no such thing. Many were duped by the difficult and heart-breaking stories, but no one was allowed to hear about the heart-breaking stories of children that were not allowed to live. No one heard the stories of parents who are not able to have children and would happily adopt an unwanted or an unplanned child.
There are alternatives out there. Maybe they do not get rid of the ‘problem’ in the way abortion allows but maybe the inconvenience they bring recognises that there is humanity in the life that is proposed for destruction.
Speaking to the Spanish parliament, Pope Leo talked of the ‘irreducible value of every human being and the moral limits of power’. The value of the unborn has been reduced to nothing and the adult human beings that have escaped the magic birth canal see no moral limits on their power over life and death of the unborn child.
“Such dignity precedes any concession by the State and cannot be subordinated to shifting social consensus or the whims of the majority at any given moment. It belongs to every human being by the very fact of their existence, and for this reason, it must guide every positive legal system.”
Ireland, as with almost every ‘developed’ nation, has subordinated that dignity of life to the whims of the majority – a majority that probably did not know the Pandora’s box they were opening.
“Every human life must be recognized and safeguarded from conception to its natural end, in every circumstance of its existence. When this certainty is obscured, the most vulnerable are the first victims, and the law loses its deepest meaning: to serve and protect every person. For this reason, the moral greatness of a nation is manifested, above all, in its capacity to accompany, protect and love those lives that are most fragile.”
Our moral greatness, then, is not at all.
Dualta Roughneen
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