Context can be lost when it comes to debating Eighth Amendment

My mother had me at 42 and I was only born because she was morally opposed to abortion, writes Victoria White.

MY FIRST encounter with abortion was when I was on a working holiday abroad and an older woman grabbed her stomach, winced and said, “I’m frightened I may be pregnant again.” Before I had a chance to reply, she added, “I’m not going to make this baby. If I make it, I die.”

She was speaking a foreign language, which is probably why I remember what she said so precisely — you don’t “make” a baby in English.

I had neither the words nor the confidence to make any comment at all. But looking back I can see she was all-but dying of emotional distress: newly delivered of a baby, in the thick of post-natal depression, in a terrible marriage and pregnant again.

There was no unpicking, at that point, the different factors behind that miserable pregnancy. It was a fact. Her desperation was a fact. A few days later, her abortion was a fact.

Abortion can be a fact in a viable marriage too. I know that from the chilling despair which descended on me when I wrongly thought I was pregnant again during a holiday on a remote island with no chemist selling pregnancy tests.

One of my children had recently been diagnosed with autism and I had three others. I knew, in the marrow of my bones, that a baby would threaten all their chances of a decent life.

I love children. But every pregnancy has a context and every expectant mother knows that. It is context which turns pregnancies into abortions.

This fact was stressed by the grande dame of Irish feminism Nell McCafferty in a wonderful intervention filmed at her home for Claire Byrne Live this week, which had my 18-year-old shouting from the sitting-room, “Listen to this, it’s the most intelligent thing I’ve heard so far about abortion”.

“Context” she said, was what mattered, a fact she said was utterly ignored so far in Leinster House. First, she said, we need contraception. Clearly we no longer have to take the “Condom Train” to Belfast as McCafferty did in her activist youth but surely the war is not over in terms of ensuring the availability and advisability of contraception.

Well OK, that’s the sexual health context. But the social context for abortions is the biggest factor.

“Social housing” was the second thing mentioned by Mc Cafferty as prevention against abortion, which rang a loud bell with the young adult in the house.

This veteran women’s rights campaigner, part of a movement focussed to a large degree on helping women avoid conception, warned on Monday against reducing the unborn child to the status of a few cells, citing her mother’s traumatic experience of miscarriage at four months.

“That was a baby”, her mother told her.

McCafferty spoke out about the barriers young people face in welcoming a child.

“What do we give young pregnant women?” she asked.

“Abortion!” Ireland’s “intergenerational solidarity” rating is quite good by international standards but that reflects the fact that we simply have more young people than do most of our peer-developed countries.

That won’t go on forever unless we seriously address the historic tyranny of the no-longer-fertile over the fertile in this country. Kids need jobs which pay them a living wage. They need accommodation. If my 18-year-old came home and said there was a baby on the way his best hope of a home would be our garage.

Ireland is towards of the middle of the OECD’s income inequality rankings but couple low income with stratospheric accommodation prices in our major cities and you have an impossible situation for young people. I scraped through the 1980s recession as a youngster but I could get a place to live for €25 a week.

Women are responding by delaying motherhood.

Yes, we have a tradition of late marriage born of our history of poverty and emigration. But when you see us having our first babies at 31, later than any other mothers in the EU, you have to ask what’s going on.

Our nearest rivals in the elderly mammies race are Spain and Italy, both basket cases when it comes to accommodation and youth unemployment. Most of European countries have first-time mothers in their 20s.

The vast majority of Irish women we know to have had abortions since records began were in their 20s, their prime child-bearing years — 1,500 in 2016, for example. With all this controversy about the use of Down syndrome in the abortion debate nobody has mentioned that the chance of having a child with this condition is 1,000 to 1 for women in their 20s but rises exponentially after the age of 35 until it is 1 in 67 for a woman of 42.

I remember reading these statistics on the floor of the old Waterstones bookshop in Dublin when I was pregnant at 35. I had convinced myself the perceived risk was an anti-feminist conspiracy but I was soon enlightened.

My mother had me at 42 and I was only born because she was morally opposed to abortion. I certainly wouldn’t like a culture to develop in Ireland such as it is in the UK where I was asked by some lovely friends why I wasn’t doing tests so I could abort an “unsatisfactory” baby?

Turned out, of course, that I had an “unsatisfactory” baby, but there is no pre-natal test for autism.

SOME day there may be. Perhaps my grandchildren may be tested in the womb, given that we now have autism in the family.

What will my response be, if this fictional test comes out positive or even inconclusive? I don’t know. But I do know that having watched me living in fear of the loss of services which will attend my ASD son’s 18th birthday would not be encouraging to any prospective parent in the family.

Context.

I understand and respect the pro-life argument that the availability of abortion encourages its use. The point is that abortion is available — in the UK. At least if clinics open here and hopefully gather proper data we will understand the context of our abortions.

Context is everything. I will to vote to repeal the eighth and to allow abortion on demand up to 12 weeks’ gestation but first I want to hear how we are planning to make having a baby possible for young people.

I’ve heard a lot about “safe” and still more about “legal”. What I want to hear from Leo Varadkar is how he’s going to make our abortions “rare”.