In 2018, your columnist had the not entirely golden opportunity to be at the forefront of the ultimately unsuccessful campaign against the repeal of the eighth amendment in Ireland. It was, as far as I am concerned, the last political job I will ever take.
Yours truly is blessed with very thick skin: Insults and abuse tend to roll off me in the much the same way as a dirty car doesn’t really get any dirtier – if you take enough abuse, it all just becomes noise, and stops feeling particularly personal.
Nevertheless, that campaign was particularly brutal: It’s disconcerting, reading people who have never met you tell the world that they “hate” you, viscerally. It is also depressing, watching people descend to a point where they tell blatant lies, and rejoice in telling those lies and disseminating them as far as possible, because the untruths are good for the cause. It is not an experience I particularly desire to endure again.
That said, it should be recognised that the result of the referendum, whilst regrettable, was legitimate. People listened to the arguments on both sides, and made a conscious decision to allow unborn babies to be killed on the grounds that their existence is inconvenient to somebody. I write that with no bitterness, it is simply a statement of fact. It is an honest description of the decision the electorate made. You can use other descriptions – “allowed women to make a choice”, and so on – but all of those are just sanitised ways of saying the exact same thing that I have just written above. The “choice” is the choice to kill, or have killed.
This week, the Oireachtas voted to extend that right to kill to the sixth month of pregnancy and to decriminalise it in almost every circumstance. Whether the bill on which they voted ever becomes law is in many ways a secondary concern: It is the expressed will of the Irish parliament that abortion should be legal until the sixth month of a pregnancy, for any reason.
This vote came five years after this same parliament solemnly promised the people that they were voting for something of a wholly more palatable nature.
I write this because it is important to put it on the record: For all that people like me were called “liars” during the referendum on abortion, it was we who told you the truth, and the other side who “lied”.
They never intended the proposal you voted for to remain law. That proposal was merely bait in a trap. Once you took it, they waited for a slightly less than decent interval, and then unveiled the true policy. And there is not one thing you can do about it.
On a personal level, I confess that I find myself strangely unbothered by it all: Perhaps that is because to me it seems so absurd to say that killing an unborn child in May is more acceptable than killing at the end of July. To me, it’s a bit like people’s moral qualms about eating veal: You feel better about eating cattle but only if they had six months more of fattening up so they can be called beef? Your objection isn’t really moral or principled, in that case: it’s more about the comfort of your own conscience.
But for the many people who do see a difference, this is, and should be remembered as, a shocking betrayal.
You were led to believe, remember, that it was those of us who were pro-life who were somehow the extremists who were not telling you the truth. And, fair enough, to some people the pro-life position is extreme. But we didn’t lie about it.
It is worth recalling, for the record, the things that were said at the time, to get you to acquiesce to 12 weeks. You were told, for example, that abortions after 12 weeks were vanishingly rare, and that 95% of more took place before 10 weeks. If that is so, then ask yourself what the need is to extend the legislation beyond that?
You were told too that abortion after 12 weeks would be legal only in cases where there was a threat to the mother, or where the child would not survive. If those cases are already accounted for in legislation (and they are) then what is the need to go beyond that?
You were told, in fact, that it was insulting to women to suggest that any woman would ever seek an elective abortion approaching the viability of the baby, or that any Irish doctor would perform one. If those things were true, then why is the Oireachtas voting now, just five years later, to make them legal?
The truth, it seems to me, is that there is a thirst bordering on the maniacal to have Ireland boast the most liberal abortion regime in the world, in part as a way of extracting vengeance on our past, and in part as a way of imagining a certain generation spinning in their graves: There’s a vindictiveness to this legislation.
That vindictiveness was evident in the evidence given to a Dáil committee this week: Doctors who do not want to perform abortions, the Dáil was told, should be actively discriminated against for employment. It is evident in the laws designed to ban peaceful protests by pro-lifers. It is evident in the sneering at those who raise even the hint of an objection.
There is a cruelty to all of this. But we should not be surprised at cruelty, from people who think it legitimate to kill a baby six months into a pregnancy. Nor should one ever be surprised at cruelty from those who shout loudly about how compassionate they are: That is the reddest of red flags.