Ireland Decides

A brief note on this matter which, though sensitive, is of such tremendous importance that silence is impossible.  Writing from Britain, I hope that the Irish people make the decision to keep the Eighth Amendment to their Constitution and, in any case, that we shall all strive for an alternative to abortion, because:

a) the idea of abortion suits all the wrong people and lends leverage to the pressure they apply: men unwilling to shoulder their responsibilities, hard-hearted families, apostles of population control, and profit-hungry businesses, including the abortion industry itself;

b) abortion includes among its victims the women who undergo them, for whom ‘choice’ is often precisely what they feel they do not have, and who are at grave risk of mental, psychological and spiritual suffering (will the abortionist help them then?); 


and, above all, 

c) if it is a child that is at the heart of the question, then it is a child, and although we may and must move mountains to help mothers in crisis pregnancies, do we not all have within ourselves this instinct, that we may not deliberately extinguish life, within or without the womb?

The referendum, and indeed the general debate about abortion in the Western world, does not really seem to be about the ‘hard cases’ such as life-threatening pregnancies, but about the general question of personal choice and autonomy.  But surely our humanity does not depend merely upon our plannedness at our beginnings?