Fine Gael TDs must stop living in past about abortion issue

ORDINARILY, it’s fun to watch politicians squirm, but when they’re reeling and writhing, in a desperate attempt to evade responsibility for actually doing the bare minimum required as part of their jobs, it gets quite tiresome.

As the deadline for the report of the expert group on abortion gets closer, you can actually see the beads of sweat on the foreheads of jittery Fine Gael TDs become more pronounced with every passing day.

Poor craturs, they’re already in an awful way — hollow harried eyes, clammy hands, a sickly yellow pallor and exuding an air of latent desperation that oozes from every pore.

“Why me?” they rage, shaking their fist at the sky, as they consider the terrible prospect of having to introduce legislation to give effect to a legal right that already actually exists.

Really, it’s just not fair. Successive governments for 20 years managed to dodge the abortion bullet pretty easily, but this current crop of misfortunes — not only do they have to introduce all of those nasty budget cuts, targeting the most vulnerable at the behest of the troika, but they have to do it while juggling an abortion grenade that’s about to spectacularly blow up in their faces.

Truly, their suffering knows no bounds. Imagine, being faced with the prospect, as a Government TD, of having to vote for legislation that reflects the will of the majority of the people you purport to represent? I mean, who gets into politics for anything as undemocratic as that? Really, it’s bordering on State-sponsored torture. I don’t know how they cope. Someone should inform Amnesty International.

For two decades an illiberal bunch of craw-thumping, sanctimonious arch conservatives in the Dáil have used women’s reproductive rights as political pawns in their attempts to ingratiate themselves with their bible-banging base.

Anti-choice campaigners laud these so-called conscientious objectors but, really, the only thing they’ve managed to achieve throughout all of those years of polarising protest is to deny women, whose lives are in danger, access to a medical procedure to save their lives.

Their self-serving cowardice has been directly responsible for the unimaginable pain and anguish that is suffered daily by women who, already dealing with serious medical issues, have been unable to assert their right to a lawful abortion in this country because the relevant legislation, regulating that constitutional right, has never been considered, let alone drafted.

While these politicians may profess themselves to be proud of this appalling record, it’s shameful and disgusting that this barbaric practice has been allowed to continue as long as it has.

Still, there are those who, grotesquely, call themselves pro-life who are still determined that women should not have access to life-saving medical treatment in their own country.

These politicians are ignorant in every sense of the word — ignorant of the results of successive referendums, which have consistently revealed that a majority of people in this country want women to have access to abortions in certain limited circumstances, ignorant of their duty under international law and ignorant of their own responsibilities as legislators in our national parliament.

Our 151-year-old abortion laws are an abomination, a Victorian-era throwback to a time when women didn’t even have the right to own property or to vote, never mind the ability to exert any autonomy over their own bodies, while the 1983 constitutional ban dates from an era when homosexuality and divorce were also illegal.

Not even in bible belt America, where the zaniest zealous members of the fringe Tea Party reside, is this blanket abortion ban considered just or humane — a fact that is evidenced by Mitt Romney’s insistence that, if he is elected president, women whose lives are in danger, or those who have suffered rape or incest, will still have access to an abortion.

Still, our own ultra-religious Tea Party branch of the Fine Gael party — and, it should be noted, the Fianna Fáil party — refuses to accept the fatuity of their position and the inevitability of impending, and long overdue, legislative change.

Having managed to long-finger any progress for two decades, preferring to instead have the High Court, in the words of one judge, act as a licensing authority for abortion, the latest wheeze from despondent politicians, who now see the writing on the wall, is that they want a free vote whenever the inevitable recommendation of the expert group, that legislation be introduced regulating a woman’s right to an abortion, comes before the House.

Apparently, denying women life-saving access to an abortion is a matter of conscience for some of these TDs while voting en masse for draconian cutbacks in the health service for the sick and the elderly, or multi-billion-euro bailouts for banks, doesn’t even register on their moral compass.

The fatuousness of this argument is breathtaking, suggesting, as it does, that women don’t already have a constitutional right to an abortion, or that abortions are not currently being carried out in Irish hospitals.

Newsflash. They are — up to 120 a year according to figures from Northern Ireland, which has the same draconian abortion law as the Republic.

While some of our political class evidently want to build a time machine and return to those halcyon days when the Church exerted a vice-like grip over this country, the rest of us would quite like it if we could all live in the here and now — you know, the 21st century.

IT SHOULD be remembered that the last time TDs were allowed a free vote was when contraception was the controversial issue du jour, back in 1974, and the then Fine Gael Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, voted against his own Government’s legislation.

The prospect of a similar farce developing in the coming months, over very restrictive abortion legislation, should not be countenanced and those politicians who truly want to make a stand on this issue should face the political consequences of their decision.

Government TDs who want to go down in the annals of history as those who, in 2012, agitated to deny women access to life-saving medical treatment should be treated as the political pariahs that they are and ejected from their parliamentary parties.

If they are determined to become martyrs to misogyny then let them, but they should not be given a free pass to ride roughshod over the express will of people and make a mockery of the democratic process that they seem determined to usurp.

Cardinal Seán Brady may want the Government to re-run the referendums of yore, but the question that he wants to again put to the Irish people has been repeatedly asked and answered — he just doesn’t like the response.

Conservative politicians may still laughably refer to an abortion debate, as if the outcome remains in question, but the truth is that the debate is over — it was over in 2002 when a majority of the electorate endorsed the X case judgment and refused to deny suicidal women access to an abortion.

Fine Gael TDs, suffering from a persecution complex, can opt to live in the past if they wish but the rest of us have entertained their delusions for long enough.