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To understand the strange obsession that our most ghastly Irish politicians have with liberalising our abortion laws even further, one needs to grasp that some see increased abortion numbers as some sort of grim win – and others are also completely deluded about its importance to voters.
It’s one thing for the SocDems to appeal to their 7% of the electorate by breathlessly dressing up aborting babies as compassion in the sort of virtue-signalling that the smug-superior-yet-strangely-failing types love. These people are lost. As children go without scoliosis operations and cancer diagnoses are missed by a chaotic health service, they are taking action to drive an already spiralling abortion rate higher. Priorities.
Sinn Féin on the other hand, much as with the immigration issue, are trying to to straddle two horses. The leftists who surged in number and influence since the water charges protests are hellbent on dragging the party into extreme positions on the culture wars issues, such as abortion, even though it cost them two elected members in 2018 – Peadar Tóibín and Carol Nolan, whose loss must have been keenly felt in a party that at times feels its barely treading water when it comes to capability.
(Not that this really matters, to be honest. Holly Cairns seems to operate entirely by relying on copious notes and soft media interviews. Fine Gael have tiktok videos. Talent isn’t in abundance really.)
But you ‘d think Sinn Féin would have learned its lesson from the god-awful drubbing it got in the 2024 referendum, when it was gung-ho with the rest of Leinster House (apart from a the usual few decent heads) in wanting to erase mothers from the Constitution and redefine the family. But no. They’re anxious about losing votes to the liberal left on immigration (even though there are far more voted to be gained by swinging to the majority on that issue) so they’re chasing the imaginary Repeal vote – as are the ever-pathetic and entirely unprincipled hapless twosome, Micheál Martin and Simon Harris.
This stems back to advice both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael took during the 2018 referendum which promised them that young voters would be theirs if only they ditched the 8th amendment and showed the yoof how liberal and progressive and trendy they were. What a joke. Both parties have continued to sink like stones.
They are chasing a Repeal vote that doesn’t exist for them- if it exists at all outside of a core fanaticism that already votes far-and-liberal left. Even claims that the issue came up on the doors in the bye-election is, frankly, baloney. Repeated polls show that abortion is not now an issue for voters – which it should be, since the spiralling numbers should be a matter of public concern, but the media’s orchestrated failure to shine a light on the shocking climb to almost 11,000 abortions a year in jig time means the numbers are never up for serious discussion.
I warrant the government parties won’t gain one percentage point by supporting the removal of the 3-day wait: it’s all about currying favour with a media and NGO class that mostly hate them. And yet Harris and Martin and Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill are saying they will support their political enemies, Sinn Féin, to make abortion even more easily accessible. This is the pathetic strategy of losers – but the unborn babies who die as a result of denying women time to think will pay the price.
And so, tonight, we’ll hear all the cliches about choice and rights and women being ‘patronised’ trotted out in the Dáil – by people who should and do know better. It’s not the case that Mary Lou McDonald, and Simon Harris and Micheál Martin don’t know what the data says. They are not entirely stupid.
The data, to put the facts, yet again, on the record, show that more than 10,000 women between 2019 and 2024 did not return for an abortion after the 3-day period of reflection. According to the HSE – responding to a PQ from Carol Nolan – there were 12,641 initial consultations for abortion while 10,441 abortions took place, meaning that 2,200 (17.4%) women did not proceed with their abortion in 2024 after that 3-day wait.
Why would anyone want that to change? Is it actually the case that these ghouls would have rather that those additional 10,000 abortions took place in that period. In any case, why would any decent person not want women to have time to reflect when it comes to ending an unborn child’s life?
The sad truth is that our politicians are mostly awful: morally bankrupt, utterly unprincipled, and bereft of real compassion. But in truth, they are aborting their own future. The majority will be made up of those who do not abort their own children – and that day will come sooner than most of the TDs in Leinster House think.
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