Joyce Fegan: Reclaiming our sexuality from church and State

A candle is lit at the Tuam Mother and Baby burial site in Tuam. Picture: Ray Ryan

I'm not surprised about the shame and I'm not surprised about the shame around sexuality. But when you pare it all back, what was really shamed was new life.

When the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was published this week, so much of it was familiar to us. 

Whether you heard snippets of it on the radio or read or listened to testimonies from adopted people or women who were sent to a "home", so much of its content was not new.

But now, in a post-marriage equality and post-Repeal Ireland, the way this report landed was different. 

It landed into a newer Ireland, an Ireland where young women share soundbites of Philomena Lee's Radio One interview on their Instagram feed. 

They no longer had to tune into, or out of, two men discussing a 3,000-page report with a legal analyst in one ear and a politician in the other.

These young women are also of an age where many are now mothers themselves. 

Their mothers, whether they ended up in a "home" or not, would have been affected in one way or another by a whole society that saw sex, and pregnancy, as dirty, wrong and sinful. Even within marriage.

Remember Irish women, still living, had to go kneel at the altar, "to be churched" after they gave birth. These were married women, whose lives fell within the social rules.

There isn't a place in Irish life or a home on the island where shame around sexuality did not touch. It was in the air you breathed. 

To love or touch outside of marriage made you wrong. But to love is human. It is what makes us human. 

So not only was our sexuality shamed and controlled and made dirty, our humanity was.

While you can say that sex and pleasure were stigmatised in Irish life, when you really pare it back, what was really shamed was life itself.

Outside of marriage — the very act of creating new life was seen as dirty, a bump, pregnancy, made you a walking leper.

But what's remarkable is that when we humans observe nature, and we do so with wonder, we stand in awe as we watch a panda or an elephant give birth in the zoo. 

We tend lovingly to a flower in our garden that goes from bud to bloom. 

We tell our friends and family about the first snowdrop or daffodil we see after a long winter. We kneel down as a puppy passes. We revere new life in nature.

But why then, did we malign and muddy and make dirty the most spectacular part of our own nature - to be able to make and birth new life ourselves?

Because it wasn't just pleasure and touch and orgasm that became diseased in Irish life, new lives outside the realm of marriage were too.

And when I read the report this week, and heard from adults who were born in those "homes" and from women who were sent there, I thought so much about these beautiful new babies that were labelled "illegitimate". 

These gorgeous, gurgle-y creatures who squeak and squeal and squirm at first, who then roll and babble and crawl and bring us all to our human senses.

In a world so often filled with shame and drudgery, those noises and sights are what bring adults back to the reality of this precious life.

And you can witness it as a doting aunt, or an enamoured grandfather, a grateful mother or as a same-sex couple. It all lands the same — love. We all feel it and witness it the same.

It is just beyond comprehension how such an incredibly special thing as the creation of new life could be so maligned.

There has been much conversation about sex not just for procreation's sake, but this is not an article about that, this is an article about the creation of new life, because that's what these "homes" policed. 

While physical pleasure was wrong, the tangible result of it, in the form of a new life, was worse and it's what took the brunt of the shame.

Most people give birth in a private way. There are only a handful of people around them. 

After they deliver their baby, friends who have gone before them will inquire as to how it went. 

You share the details of the tale most openly with those who have experienced the same.

Aunts and mothers and grandmothers will regale you with their birth stories when you tell them yours. You remember each one in vivid detail. 

There was the woman who was left alone in a small white room with a clock for two days straight as she laboured. 

There was the woman who begged to not be given an enema because she knew her baby was on the way. She wasn't believed. But the prompt baby proved otherwise.

When friends tell me their birth stories now, they're told with awe and wonder and gratitude. 

"I never felt love like it." "I felt so powerful". "I can't believe I did that". "Whenever I doubt myself now, I remind myself I gave birth". "I want to be a midwife".

When Amy Huberman left Holles Street recently having given birth to her third child, she posted a photo of a window in the hospital that looks out on to Merrion Square. 

It's a park and a view familiar to many, and stored away in a specially-assigned memory box in their brain. Never to be forgotten.

"Always emosh (emotional) leaving there and I always want to be a midwife when I leave because they are such utter legends," wrote the actor below the photo.

It was a sentiment that resonated with many. 

I've one friend who works in financial services who genuinely considered retraining to be a midwife in her 30s, so impacted was she by the sheer magic of labour and childbirth.

We stand in awe at a beautiful sunrise, or a large and bright moon. 

But the incredible act of conceiving and carrying a child and giving birth to one, we somehow managed to allow others to condemn and malign it, even within marriage sometimes.

Not any more. Never again. Not on this generation's watch, or the next's.