Bill grossly insults pregnant women and those who may become pregnant

I FEEL sick and helpless after reading the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill. This ridiculous legislation is likely to be on the statute books by the summer and I know I can do nothing about it.

It is legislation which criminalises a woman who ends her pregnancy because she wants to and threatens her with up to 14 years in prison or an unlimited fine — except when she ends her pregnancy up the road in Newry or across the pond in Aberystwyth. In which case, the loss of a human life is of no interest.

This abomination, in this country, which I love. A hypocritical patch-up job between two very different political parties who face huge challenges elsewhere. So the pregnant woman has to be cut in half, like you’d do it in a circus act, except this time the show is for real.

We can’t revisit the Constitution because the Taoiseach does not want abortion to “divide the country”. We have to wriggle away in the straitjacket of the Eighth Amendment, and with the particularly cruel restraints of the Supreme Court judgement on the X Case.

The European Court has to be reassured that our legislation accords with our Constitution. The Labour Party has to be reassured that a law which says the same thing as the Constitution is a gain for pregnant women. Fine Gael has to be reassured that nothing has changed.

I don’t envy the Government it’s task. But I object to the pregnant woman being their battleground. I object to the pregnant woman being sacrificed so that two political parties can do business together and the country is not “divided”.

Sometimes you have to risk division in order to do the right thing. Instead we are doing the wrong thing. We are enacting a law which is grossly insulting to pregnant women and women who may become pregnant.

It is a law which spells out that the pregnant woman herself must have no say in whether her pregnancy ends with a baby or not. A law designed, in that disgusting phrase, “not to open the floodgates” to the torrents of hussies who’d ditch their pregnancies if they had half a chance.

Haven’t the legislators noticed that virtually every Irish mother they’ve ever known would gaily cut off her right hand to benefit her child, born or unborn? No they haven’t. They haven’t noticed the astonishing renewable energy which powers our country — the power of maternal love. But notwithstanding their amazing capacity to love, every mother knows that she is the final arbiter on a pregnancy. Unless you institutionalise all pregnant women — or all women who could become pregnant — then it will always be possible for pregnant women to have the final say in ending a pregnancy because babies are part of their bodies.

We, who have had the horror of backstreet abortions in our country, and whose fields and ditches carry the bones of thousands of murdered infants, know this. There is no effective way of forcing pregnant women to have healthy babies if they don’t want them. No effective way except cherishing pregnant women and their babies.

That’s the thing which we don’t do and never have done. I have a friend whose parents drove her, in silence, to the mail boat to the UK when she said she was pregnant. They never saw their daughter or her child again.

Two of my friends have recently discovered forced adoptions in their families which destroyed the mothers in question. If you see a woman with “dead eyes” on the street today she might be one of them. Wiped out by a system which said that she wasn’t good enough to raise her own child.

We don’t do that stuff any more. But since 1983 we’ve decided to turn this country into Fort Knox for pregnant women. If you get pregnant here, you’ll have to have your baby whether you like it or not. Unless you go out the backdoor to another country, in which case it doesn’t matter.

The mistake Ms X’s parents made was to exit by the front door. Now, after 20 years of stunned stasis, we have our new legislation. Fort Knox is still there, stronger than ever. With the backdoor to the UK left ajar.

You can go out the front door if you’re dying but you’ll have to prove it. Two medical practitioners will have to certify that there is an “immediate” risk to your life. You can appeal their decision and wait up to two weeks before you face another wall of medical practitioners who will make sure you’re not just trying it on.

The chances of a “try on” are much more likely when the risk to life is that of suicide. So if you think you’re going to kill yourself the process of certification for abortion is, in the Taoiseach’s words, “more rigorous”.

You’ll have to prove yourself suicidal to three consultant doctors, including one obstetrician and two psychologists, who must agree unanimously. If they turn you down, you can appeal the decision in writing. Up to a week can pass before a panel of three medical practitioners is established to review the application, and another week can pass before they do so.

You could be sitting there saying “I’m so miserable about this pregnancy I’m going to kill myself” for an unquantified time until your case is seen by the first three medics and for a further two weeks until the second three medics have delivered themselves of their opinion on your appeal

Is this ever going to happen? I don’t think so. If it did happen it would be, as Dr Bernie McCabe of the South Meath Mental Health Services, said on RTÉ yesterday, “An abuse of the psychiatric profession and a possible abuse of women’s rights.” What will happen, instead, is that pregnant women who don’t want to be pregnant will buy abortifacient drugs on the Internet or get the hell out to the UK for an abortion.

The only Irish women who will be left looking at the Protection of Life during Pregnancy law will be women so disadvantaged by their health or educational or economic status that they can’t get out.

That’s because the whole thrust of the bill is to distinguish between a pregnant woman’s health and a threat to her life and between her life and a threat to the life of her unborn child. But you can’t make a meaningful distinction between a threat to a woman’s health and a threat to her life when it comes to pregnancy. And you can’t make a meaningful distinction between a threat to a pregnant woman’s life and a threat to that of her unborn child.

The only way you can protect the life of unborn children is to protect both the life and the health of mothers. That means doing something we have never done — prioritising the needs of mothers and their babies throughout our legislation — not trying to lock them in with this law.