We abandon pregnant women in crisis until it becomes life or death

That a premature baby was delivered by caesarian section because of concerns for the mother’s mental health has staggering implications for this society, writes Victoria White.

I can barely believe that a child would be taken by the State from the life-giving environment of the womb and put in an incubator at 25 weeks’ gestation.

Friends who had premature babies at 30 weeks, or a little later, speak of desperately “hanging onto” their babies in the womb, because every day counted. One friend speaks of going to bed every night saying: “This was a good day, because the baby wasn’t born.”

Here you have our national health service extracting a baby from the womb in the knowledge that its health will likely be impaired as a consequence: Four out of 10 babies born at that stage have later problems with hearing, sight, intellect or behaviour.

We have so wilfully tied ourselves up in constitutional and legal knots that we treat pregnant girls and women with all the flexibility of Harry Houdini mid-trick. The disgustingly entitled Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act is just another big knot, and it is astonishing that our legislature applauded as it was tied.

All the problems in that legislation were articulated by many people, including this writer in this space.

How could we enact legislation that criminalised the procuring of an abortion and punished it with a 14-year sentence, except if you had it outside this State, in which case we’d help you if we could? How could they enact legislation in which the age of the unborn child was not even contemplated?

The Government was hoping nothing would happen, or at least not on their watch. This was the Protection of the Life of the Coalition Act. It is a disaster. I say it again: We need to repeal the Eighth Amendment and start all over again. We need early abortion on demand. A gestational limit of 10 weeks, such as in Slovenia, seems to be the earliest practical limit and we should study it.

I consider myself “pro-life”. I have far more in common with the sane and humane side of the “pro-life” lobby than with the stridently “pro-choice”, a term I despise because I don’t believe women in Ireland choose to have abortions the way they choose their kitchens.

I wish no woman in Ireland ever felt she had no choice but to have an abortion. But they have no choice, up to 4,000 of them a year. We have not yet come close to achieving a pro-life society. While we may live in a stable society and do not need to fear predators or starvation, women with unwanted pregnancies face insurmountable barriers: Social stigma, economic collapse.

And we leave them on their own with their troubles, with the unexpressed justification that they brought it on themselves. We weren’t so careless. We had our babies in good circumstances, or we had none at all.

We are the same people who put young, pregnant women under “sustained pressure” to kill their babies, as Cliona Rattigan says in her study of infanticide, ‘What Else Could I Do’? (2012)

In a state of plenty, with extra hands and extra funds to rear extra children, there should be little reason for women in Ireland to seek abortions.

But we have deliberately constructed a society in which women will continue to be desperate to abort pregnancies. And it is clear, from the interview with the girl at the centre of the current controversy, that she carries her fear of stigma as an unwed mother from her own culture. She feels branded by her Caesarian scar.

I understand and accept the pro-life argument that life begins at conception and that to put a time limit on access to abortion is to play God. However, in a less-than-perfect society, in which women will seek abortions, I believe early abortions, ideally at eight weeks and certainly before 10 weeks, are less damaging than late ones.

They are less damaging to women, physically and psychologically. This is clear because many pregnancies, up to one in four, are naturally aborted in the first trimester, and unless the pregnancy has been very hard-won, most women overcome the disappointment relatively quickly.

This is not the case with late miscarriages, whereby a woman’s body and mind have formed around the reality of a child kicking in the womb.

Such miscarriages are always absolutely devastating.

The young woman at the heart of our latest abortion scandal says she first sought an abortion, on learning she was pregnant, at eight weeks and four days’ gestation. I believe that, if she still wanted an abortion after appropriate counselling, she should have had one then, no questions asked.

There is no argument for getting into whys and wherefores. Making categories of “abortable” babies is grossly insulting both to women and to their infants. The child of a rapist is no less a child than the child of a loving couple.

The issue is that the women will not, cannot, carry the child to term, and as the baby is part of the woman’s body, we can choose to help her or leave her to her own devices.

Our legislation, no more than any other, has no understanding of the “two people in one” that constitutes a woman and her unborn child.

This is surely because our philosophers and religious thinkers were all men. Mainstream thinking as to what constitutes an individual breaks down when faced with an unborn child that is part of his mother’s body and wholly dependent on her for life itself.

We need not concern ourselves with the degree of distress a woman is feeling because she rejects the unborn child in her womb enough to want an abortion. Just being in that situation is torture enough for any woman and she should not have to prove it.

She should have the right to end her pregnancy as early as possible, and as safely as possible, but she should not have the right to end her pregnancy late, except for pressing health reasons.

Should those reasons include suicidal ideation? It is very easy to pontificate from a quiet desk and I feel huge compassion for the doctors and nurses who had the care of the young girl in the current case.

However, I still need to be convinced that nothing could have been done to give her unborn baby his human right to 40 weeks in the womb.

It should never have come to that.

This young woman’s pregnancy should have ended at eight weeks if, with the best of counselling, she still felt it must be ended. Our work as a society is to give such a welcome to every baby that few young women ever feel that way.

We leave them on their own with their troubles, with the justification that they brought it on themselves