We hear constantly about the radicalisation of young men, and the misogyny underpinning a sense of entitlement which endangers women.
Sinead Gibney of the Social Democrats used some of her time in the Dail this week to talk about online harms that she said are fuelling younger members of our society “into thinking that it is okay to objectify and demean women.” She said that the internet is fuelling an “epidemic of sexual and gender-based violence.”
But what I did not hear Deputy Gibney, or any other left-wing female politician speak about this week – and what I can be certain they will not speak about – is an unsettling case involving male coercion and abortion. The events, which happened in Donegal in 2020, were reported, to their credit, by RTE from the courts.
The story is this: A man forced a vulnerable woman to take abortion pills on Valentine’s Day on 2020. The case gives a glimpse into a new, disturbing sense of entitlement that has taken hold in the minds of some men in this country, enabled by the repeal of the eighth amendment.
The details of the case are worth including here. The man caused an unlawful abortion after forcing the woman to take five abortion pills and then locking her in a room. He will be sentenced next week.
The young man, in his twenties, behaved appallingly. He told the woman that he would beat her nine-week old unborn baby out of her if she did not take the tablets.
He pleaded guilty to two counts: a charge relating to administering, supplying or procuring any drug, substance, instrument, apparatus or other thing knowing that it was intended to be used or employed to end the life of an unborn child, and a charge of assaulting the woman and causing her harm.
Addressing the court with a gut-wrenching victim impact statement, the woman said: “While the world celebrated love, I was trapped, terrified and losing my baby at the hands of someone I thought I could trust.”
Gardaí, the court heard, had arrived at what was believed to be a domestic incident just before 2:20pm on February 14th 2020.
The woman, who was in the house (while the man was out buying a pregnancy test to see if the pills had worked), told them she had been forced to take the abortion pills, which the Examiner says the man had procured from a pharmacy in Dublin. The court was told the pair had met on Snapchat when the accused was a student, and that the man said she was not his girlfriend.
The woman had already undergone a prior abortion when she fell pregnant to this same man in October 2019. That time around, a doctor had prescribed abortion tablets and the court heard how they had both come to that decision.
However, when she found out she was pregnant again, just a few months later, in January 2020, she decided she wanted to keep the baby.
The accused found out that the woman had not attended an appointment to see her GP as she wished to keep the child, and cancelled a planned holiday. The Examiner details how he invited the woman to his home in Donegal “under the belief that he too wanted to keep the baby.”
An audio recording was played to the courtroom heard of a conversation between the man and the victim when he told her she had to have an abortion, and that he was “forcing” her.
The man forced her to take five misoprostol 200mg tablets, told her how to swallow them, and then locked her in a bedroom in his house. He was heard saying: “It’s either you eat this or I beat that kid out of you tonight. I’m dead serious – I’m forcing you. I don’t care. Take it.”
We’re often told time and time again, and then repeatedly reminded, on occasions like the St Brigid’s Bank Holiday, that the Irish Government is proud of the “progress” made by abortion campaigners in this country in the form of 60,000 abortions.
Welcome to our shiny, liberal new Ireland which we hold up to the world as aspirational. I wrote at the beginning of the month about how the Department of Foreign Affairs used its St Brigid’s Day ad to signal to the whole world just how proud it is, exclusively, of the types of women who convinced this country to strip away all protections for babies in the womb.
The kind of women who still wear their Repeal jumpers eight years after polling day and bang on about removing the three-day wait, which is an important time to reflect and has led to women turning away from abortion.
There are those whose whole lives seem dedicated to a peculiar obsession with abortion and getting those numbers up. We’re supposed to be eternally thankful that our country voted the ‘right’ way on abortion.
Well, if you were a yes voter, and you bought the lie about empowerment and choice, I’d like you to read the details of the case, particularly the part that outlines how these pills work. It’s dark and it’s sad, and it really should lead to some reflection:
“Evidence was given how, after taking the tablets, the woman came down with a fever, she was shivering, and she also had cramps. She went to the toilet at one stage, was passing large clots of blood, and she was in great pain, the court was told.”
That’s the grisly, deeply unpleasant reality of the thousands of at-home abortions, seen through the lens of one court case. How many other thousands of women bought into the absurd lie that abortion is some form of liberating, positive experience to find out it was painful and gut-wrenching?
It strikes me as hypocritical that those in the National Women’s Council who are so keen to highlight toxic masculinity with our money, have absolutely zilch to say about this story.
They have nothing to say about the entitled, aggressive attitude our new abortion culture seems to have instilled in some men. By no means am I saying all men, obviously. But this case clearly shows that an abortion regime with very little safeguards and zero mainstream critique has left women more vulnerable to some very bad and selfish men.
It seems to have created a very troubling attitude in some young men who now believe that women who do not accept what they want (abortion) are behaving unreasonably. It has created a dangerous entitlement and a burden on women to go along with ending their child’s life because that’s what their partner wants, and he can now find pills to force her to do that. Can I ask the NWC where the choice is in that?
People on the left call themselves pro-choice. In the abortion referendum, we were told this was all about choice, but it is clear as day that for the vast majority of women, this is not about choice and it never really was.
We have left Irish women completely vulnerable to abortion coercion, yet very few are admitting this is now a societal problem.
Abortion has been packaged as something which is psychologically safe.But in her victim impact statement, this woman is clear about her psychological suffering and despair.
The despair not only at the fact she was locked in a room and forced into an abortion, but the loss of the child itself, who she recognises, six years on as a real person who she misses:
“When he wrongfully imprisoned me and caused the termination of my nine-week pregnancy, he took far more than my freedom. He took my child. He took my sense of safety. He took a future that I had already begun to plan and love.
“My baby was real to me. I had hopes, dreams, and a bond with the life that was growing inside of me, and all of that was violently stolen from me in a moment of cruelty that I will never forget.”
How many other women quietly feel the same? Scratch beneath the surface of Irish ‘progress,’ and you are sure to find suffering like that detailed here. Abortion coercion, as we can see from this week’s case, ramped up in Ireland with Repeal. And it’s a crying shame that we as a country lack the backbone to address it.