We need to support mothers and children to become pro-life society

WHAT would a pro-life country look like?

Does a pro-life country even exist? I often fantasise about the matriarchal society on the island of Kuna Yala off Panama’s Caribbean coast in which the onset of a girl’s fertility is the biggest excuse for a celebration. But I’ve never been there and I would have to go to find out if it’s an anti-life society in other ways.

In a genuinely pro-life country, every child would be cherished by the whole community, no matter how unintended his or her conception. It would be understood that the future lay in the welfare of babies. And that the future would not be pretty if those babies didn’t get the right start.

Which would require, particularly in the first three years, the presence of a loving parent or guardian. Because in those years the brains of the future are made at the rate of a million connections every second. If a parent or guardian is not present and able to show love, those connections are made badly.

And once you’ve got your brain, you’ve got to know what to do with it. A pro-life country would prioritise education, particularly in the early years. Free kindergarten was introduced in Germany when they tightened up their abortion laws.

Not that a pro-life society would stop cherishing kids when they become teens. No, it would strive to protect and educate its teenagers, showing them positive pathways into the future when they themselves would be adults. Pro-life adults.

The technical ban on abortion in this country achieves none of this.

The politicians have taken boxes of briefing documents on abortion away with them on their holliers because the Government’s advisory group may recommend legislation in September. Labour is dying to be seen doing something about the liberal agenda, whatever that is; Fine Gael is half-dying to be seen giving a boot to the Catholic Church while the other half is dying to be seen defending it; Fianna Fáil is exploiting the confusion by defending the status quo.

I’m sure there are some politicians among them whose conscience wakes them in the night saying: “Do something about abortion!” But as a woman who grew to maturity during the ghastly Amendment campaigns of 1983, the use of abortion for political gain makes me sick to my stomach.

Because I haven’t seen, in those 29 years since we enshrined the protection of the unborn in our Constitution, any resolution to change the status of mothers and babies in this country. Just this year, we had two depressing incidents which prove this: The threat to remove a lone parent’s allowance when his or her child reaches the age of seven; and the furore caused by Padraig O’Shea, headmaster of St Joseph’s College, Co Tipperary, for refusing entry to a pregnant teenager on the grounds that the school would not be a “dumping ground” for such young people.

Joan Burton has since said she’ll leave the lone parent’s allowance in place until the child reaches 14 unless we develop a “Scandinavian” childcare system — though she neglects to say if she is advocating a flexible payment to the parent, as in Norway, or universal state childcare, as in Denmark.

And the Tipperary ex-headmaster Padraig O’Shea was criticised heavily by most commentators, even though he still maintains he received “universal support” in his community.

But I still believe the idea that unwanted pregnancy is a moral failing which should be punished by hard labour is common. When I mentioned the pregnant teen refused a place at school to a friend, she said: “You can understand the dilemma of the principal. It’s like teenage suicide. If you don’t condemn it, it will spread.”

For hours I could think of nothing except this extraordinary equation of suicide with pregnancy. Later I emailed: “It’s a baby up her jumper, not a time-bomb!”

Our so-called pro-life Constitution has done precious little to change attitudes to unintentionally pregnant women. All it has done is reinforced the practice of sending our problem pregnancies off-shore. And most people seem quite happy with that outcome, or at least they were in 1992, when we voted in a referendum to allow free abortion information and free travel, though we refused to rule out suicide as a valid threat to the life of a mother, to reverse the Supreme Court ruling on the X case.

But we still didn’t legislate for it to happen in Ireland. And even last week Michael Martin argued against legislating for abortion on the grounds of the threat of suicide in this newspaper, saying it might give rise to “an open-door situation”.

This country opened every other door a long time ago. Information, capital, and even people zoom back and forth from this country from everywhere on earth. We had a painful lesson in the extent of our interconnectedness when Lehmann Brothers fell in 2008 and our banking system fell with it. Two years later, a decision was made at G20 level that Ireland required a bailout to save the euro.

The only territory we are interested in guarding now is our ban on abortion. Which achieves very little except allowing us to continue in ignorance of how little we care about the welfare of mothers and babies.

OUR abortion rate does seem to be the lowest in Europe, though it’s hard to judge, as many Irish women having abortions in the UK do not give their home address. It’s probable the ban on abortion has some bearing on the number of abortions, though how much is unclear. In 2011, the country which came second to us in minimising abortion was the Netherlands, which has one of the most open abortion regimes in Europe.

It should be the aim of every government to minimise the need for abortion. Every government should see each abortion statistic as a comment on how warmly they welcome every baby born in their state.

The way some so-called pro-choice activists talk about abortion, you’d think it could rank among a woman’s highest achievements. Many seem to have forgotten the fight for a society in which very few pregnancies constitute a crisis.

Thus you have the irony of an organised, well-funded pro-choice lobby among US liberals who never mention that there is no statutory paid maternity leave in the US. What an indictment of the richest country in the world that getting rid of babies has more political support than keeping them. It’s the triumph of individualism, isn’t it? Whereas a genuinely pro-life country would be a triumph for community.

If the expert group recommends in September that the Government should legislate for abortion if the life of the woman were threatened — and if we do eventually provide for abortion — what would change? Probably not that much, as long as medical staff who are ethically opposed to abortion are exempt from providing it. Many women will still opt to have abortions in the UK for the sake of anonymity.

But perhaps it might help us make a start in confronting our failure to support mothers and children with the aim of becoming, for the first time, a pro-life society.