Women worth more than contents of their uterus

OFFLINE and unplugged during August, it takes a moment for the ‘more than a vessel’ hashtag to contextualise.

Oh. The UN Human Rights Committee chair was not talking about hideous events in Ireland’s past, where so many ordinary women were treated with all the dignity and compassion we reserve for livestock.

No, the vessel’s comment refers to hideous events in the present. Here we are once more, as though Savita Halappanavar never happened. The Irish state has again disgraced itself in its treatment of women.

This disgrace is ongoing and normalised in that it happens 12 times a day, every day, every time an Irish woman gets on a plane to the UK for an abortion her own state refuses to provide. It is not possible however to sweep this latest disgrace under the carpet, the standard pathetic state response to anything involving abortion, because the woman in question was not in a position to make the expensive, stressful journey to Britain.

That this kind of insanity can still happen to women in Ireland in 2014 is beyond comprehension. Were it going on in undeveloped countries, where female reproductive rights were non-existent, thanks to a dominant patriarchal belief system and deep cultural misogyny, we would be wringing our hands, rattling tins, signing online petitions. Instead it’s happening in front of us. Why? The Irish church and state hates women. Always has done. Ireland’s misogyny is so ingrained, so deeply rooted, that generations of women have learned to manoeuvre around it, until cases like this latest one, involving the suicidal woman denied her abortion rights, trip us up again.

Here is the crux of this misogyny. The state continues to evade the fact that a woman is more important than a foetus. The idea that a foetus can somehow have equal status to a woman means one of two things — it gigantifies the foetus, transforming a cell cluster into a legal human, or it dematerialises a woman, turning an adult female into a mobile incubator. You know, a vessel.

I have kids. If in future my daughter ever needed an abortion — which would be nobody’s business but her own, no matter what the reason — my concern would be wholly around her physical, mental and emotional health, her well-being, her future, her happiness. The idea that she should share equal legal status with a foetus would be laughable were it not so sinister, so dystopian. Women are worth more than the contents on their uterus. The Irish state needs to consider just what exactly it thinks it’s doing, inflicting medieval legislation on its female residents and still expecting to be treated like a grown up country. Enough.