Women’s rights still forgotten in abortion debate

Before adding my tuppence ha’penny worth to the abortion debate, let me state at the outset — I am pro choice.

This means I believe that I, as a woman, have a fundamental, inalienable right to control over my own body. This includes the right to choose to have an abortion. Or not.

As a mother of three children, I chose not. There was no agonising involved. I wasn’t raped. I wasn’t a victim of incest. Thankfully, no fatal foetal abnormalities were flagged during pregnancy.

Had there been, I may have had a choice to make. A friend who was given the tragic news that her baby was unlikely to survive outside the womb had the courage to continue. Had she not, who had the right to condemn?

My views do not mean I am pro-abortion. I don’t, like British author Caitlin Moran, subscribe to the notion that an abortion is one of “the ultimate acts of good mothering,” based on the argument that it’s kinder to abort rather than give birth to an unwanted child. We all know of circumstances when an “unwanted” child becomes the opposite once he or she arrives.

But I do believe that in some circumstances, abortion is the only compassionate, humane, even logical path to pursue.

What mother should be expected to look in the eyes of the child who wants to know its father’s identity and deliver the devastating answer “your grandfather”?

What child should be told they are the product of rape? Must the mother live out a lie to protect the mental health of that child? What about the mother’s mental health?

Why should a mother endure 40 weeks of pregnancy knowing the most she can hope for is to cradle a dead child in her arms or to hold it oh-so-briefly before that tiny life peters out?

What infuriates me most about the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill is its failure to recognise that the vast majority of women who opt for abortion do so for very humane or unavoidable reasons, and that no one is looking for abortion on tap.

There is no compassion whatever in the language of this bill. Any woman who opts for an abortion must continue to travel abroad because, hey, it’s okay to ask our overseas neighbours, just, in the ultimate expression of Nimbyism.

If you procure an abortion here, you are committing an offence and if found guilty, face up to 14 years imprisonment, a sentence lengthier than what most rapists get in this country. This is a dangerously retrograde step for women, yet this particular clause (Section 22, subsection 2) in the bill is getting lost in the greater debate which is mainly around whether suicide should be a grounds for abortion, and if the unborn has the right to legal representation.

Unsurprisingly, it is this clause that 22 women’s organisations from across the European Union, including the National Women’s Council of Ireland, want the Government to revoke.

Pro-Choice group, Action X, argues the threat of criminal conviction “will make doctors more likely to delay a necessary termination and increase the risks to women and girls”.

They argue that in countries where abortion is criminalised, the outcome is not fewer abortions but higher rates of injury to women.

They also rightly highlight the hypocrisy of the Government in granting explicit permission to women to travel abroad for abortion while threatening criminal conviction if they procure an abortion here.

We all know the bottom line is the Government doesn’t have the balls or the appetite to legislate properly for abortion. Women continue to be treated with contempt by a patriarchal society that saw nothing wrong, until recently, with sawing a woman’s pelvis in half.

Instead we have to put up with information being filtered on the basis of ideological preferences; we must endure debate that often has little or nothing to do with intelligence or compassion and everything to do with the kind of prejudices no reasoned arguments can breach; and we are forced to sit and watch as women are again left with the sense that 30 years after the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland introduced a constitutional ban on abortion, very little as regards women’s rights, particularly where religion plays a part, has changed.