Vast majority of decisions to abort are rational, and always have been

WHAT upsets me most about the Government’s decision to legislate for abortion in Ireland in cases of a risk of death by suicide is how it patronises women.

A woman will no longer be “bad” if she has her pregnancy terminated in Ireland. Now she can be sick or “mad”.

Everybody knows the vast majority of the 4,000-odd Irish women who have abortions every year in the UK are making painful, but rational decisions, because they feel the child inside them would not be born into good circumstances.

Women have, since the dawn of time, sought to end pregnancies when they don’t think the babies have any chance of a decent life. If they have not had the means to procure abortions, they have practised abandonment or infanticide.

This is absolutely clear from any study of the history of our kind. Mothers have always decided whether or not their future child is viable according to the resources available to them.

I was going to use the word “chosen” there, but I stopped myself. I hate that slogan “the woman’s right to choose”. It brings to mind a woman fingering through different colours of tights in a department store, not a woman making a decision whether or not the baby inside her should be born.

Is “choice” really involved at all? In Mother Nature, her thumping tome on motherhood, leading primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy writes of the decision to end a pregnancy: “No social creature, even the most independent woman, makes such decisions in a vacuum.

In addition to laws, technologies, and protection from environmental hazards, there are today, as in the past, people both more and less powerful than the mother herself who shape the reproductive options available to her.”

In situations where survival is difficult, as in most of our history as mothers, “choice” will involve working out if there is enough food or if a predator, human or otherwise, will kill any child you might have.

I had an eerie experience of just such a deep instinct once when I was running along a beach with my three children, including twins. I genuinely heard an internal voice say, “Leave the weakest one behind.”

Luckily, I have plenty of resources both emotional and material, and could afford to ignore the voice. But I often thought of that moment when years later, the “weakest one” turned out to be autistic.

When I heard that voice I was not aware the child had a disability. I honestly believe the ancient mother inside me understood he did, long before I had an official diagnosis.

In my world there could be no justification for doing anything which would lessen the chances of my beloved “weakest” child. He is always my first priority. But if I were in survival mode, close to nature, I might have to make a choice to save two by sacrificing one and I don’t think moral judgements would have much force.

In this part of the world, we are not in survival mode. In survival mode, women are, in any case, less likely to get pregnant because menstruation is delayed and fertility impaired. This is why, Hrdy speculates, it took 50,000 years for our population to double at the dawn of human time, while nowadays the population doubles every 50 years.

Nowadays the stresses in our lives are much less likely to impair fertility but just as likely to make a woman feel she can’t have a baby. Some women face pregnancy in situations of huge financial and social stress, and as a society, we have to take responsibility for this.

As we plan to legislate for abortion, we are not lessening these stresses, we are making them more acute. Cutting Child Benefit. Replacing it in some cases of social disadvantage with back-to-work initiatives which may make poorer women leave their children earlier. Don’t want them sitting round doing nothing, do we?

Just yesterday I asked a single parent with a disabled child what she was doing for Christmas and was immediately sorry I had done so. They will be on their own. Her family has organised a get-together so rowdy that her son will not be able to cope with it and she feels they have done it knowingly.

It’s not just that we don’t support single mothers enough with professional childcare. We don’t roll our own sleeves up to help out. We don’t accept that every kid is ours to raise collectively as a society. And throughout history, the lack of a collective childcare effort has led to the abandonment of infants.

Hrdy notes that between 1879 and 1881 69,000 babies were left in foundling homes in Sicily, while only 15 met that end in Sardinia. In Sardinia there was a “mother-centred” family network which supported all new mothers.

Our abortion statistics are a direct comment on how genuinely child-centred our society is. Do we tell all new mothers, “We’ll pick you up when you fall?” We sure as hell don’t.

As well as financial pressures, women nowadays face social pressures which may seriously affect their judgement as to whether a child is possible or not. We can be viciously conservative about whether it’s wise to have a child or not in this country.

Got to have a big education first. Got to have a job. Got to have a house.

YES, there may be such a thing as an abortion culture. A young woman told me recently about her 20-something friend living in the UK who had an abortion there and has been psychologically fragile ever since. She is still with the father of the lost child.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want a child with him. She just put her career first because she thought that was what she should do. As her young friend said, “the culture” in the UK helped her along the way.

There is a risk that the availability of abortion in this country could encourage a culture in which aborting the baby of a much-loved partner because it didn’t figure in your career plan might seem reasonable.

But there are forces which are far more powerful in creating that culture than a willing hospital. The rampant materialism in our society has managed to completely devalue the work of mothers and the intrinsic value of children.

A mother puts no price on the work of loving a child. A child’s work has no price. So what the hell are they for, either of them? Cut those benefits. Get those mothers into some real work. This is the culture which produces our thumping abortion statistics.

Legislating for the Supreme Court Judgement on the X Case so that a woman who is threatening to kill herself may have her pregnancy terminated will not change it.

Pregnant women will still be told what to do by professionals who take no responsibility for the appalling circumstances into which some of our children are born. Our children. Our collective responsibility.