A moral cul-de-sac

WHILE the full facts of the tragic case of Savita Halappanavar have yet to established, there has been no formal rebuttal of the claim by the dead woman’s husband that when he sought an abortion to save her life, the response given was that “this is a Catholic country”.

Whether that assertion was actually made or not, it is still widely believed both internally and externally that Ireland is indeed such a country and, that being so, there can or should be little or no surprise in hearing it said.

However, saying that “this is a Catholic country” is different to saying “this is a country where Catholicism is the dominant religion” or “this is a country where Catholicism is the religion of the vast majority of the citizens”.

What it actually implies is an element of exclusivity that is at odds with the social reality of Ireland in the 21st century. Some might go further and say that the statement implies an element of “ownership”. What is beyond doubt is the implication that the Catholic moral code is an essential element of the law of the land.

The “ownership” manifested itself in very concrete form in the spheres of education and health, and in a number of institutions under the control of religious orders. The scandals that have come to light over the past decade concerning some of these institutions have seriously eroded the authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

But this shouldn’t disguise the nature of the pact entered into with the Church by the State since independence. As Chrystel Hug explained in her book The Politics of Sexual Morality in Ireland, “in 1922 the Catholic Church became the most powerful ally of the new state”.

But the price of that arrangement was the ceding of control to the clerical establishment of education. In his ground-breaking 1971 book Church & State in Modern Ireland 1922-1970, JH Whyte summed the situation up well when he said the “interpenetration of Church and State is seen most clearly in the field of education”.

Clerical control also extended into the sphere of health. “Like education, health care in Ireland has traditionally been controlled and run by the Catholic Church,” according to Ivana Bacik of TCD in her book Kicking and Screaming: Dragging Ireland into the 21st Century.

It didn’t end there however; the “interpenetration” of which Whyte speaks found new and more formal expression in the 1937 Constitution (replacing the 1922 Free State Constitution), of which the principal architect was Éamon de Valera.

In his 1989 book Modern Ireland 1600-1972, the Oxford historian RE Foster (a native of Waterford) is adamant that “de Valera’s Ireland became a 26-county state with 32-county pretensions, institutionalising a powerful Catholic ethos that was symbolically celebrated in the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, and effectively enshrined in the Constitution if 1937”. The Constitution is often seen or held up as a touchstone of how embedded Catholicism is in the Irish political/social/legal order. And it is this same Constitution that is now the main impediment to a change in the law on abortion.

The veil of uncertainty over abortion in this country — the newly coined word “omnishambles” seems particularly appropriate — has grown more dense since 1983 and the so-called “pro-life” amendment.

If the tragedy of Savita Halappanavar is not to be repeated, then the constitutional roadblock to abortion must be removed.

Anything less than this will be perceived as a fudge, and rightly so. We will once again be resorting to yet another version of an Irish solution to an Irish problem. Except it isn’t a solution and it isn’t just an Irish problem.

It’s a problem that reaches beyond our shores, not just in the sense that problematical and dangerous pregnancies occur without any regard for national boundaries, but in the sense that our moral code has for too long been dictated by Rome.

We have acquiesced for too long in the face of moral rules formulated by male celibates in the Vatican buttressing their diktats (for that is what they are) by invoking a version of “natural law” that is in effect presented as having the status of God’s law.

Our acceptance of these Roman diktats led to a situation in 1983 where the political establishment in Dublin gave way under pressure from the self-styled pro-life lobby.

Having capitulated to this lobby, they decided to press ahead with a referendum which led to an amendment to the Constitution.

This led to the now infamous eighth amendment, which was in effect the creation of a constitutional straitjacket because it sought to give recognition to the equal right to life of the mother and the unborn.

In fact, it begins by acknowledging the right to life of the unborn, adding “with due regard to the equal right of the mother” — as though there could somehow be an “unborn” in the womb without there first being a mother.

It is very doubtful if the terms of the Supreme Court ruling in the X case in 1992 could have been stretched to cover the circumstances of the Savita Halappanavar case (though of course we have to await the findings of the investigation into the circumstances of that case, an investigation that will now not be completed until Christmas, according to the Health Minister Dr James Reilly).

Notwithstanding the findings of that investigation, it is already clear that what the Savita Halappanavar case has shown is that any new legislation must move beyond the X case ruling.

Broader grounds for abortion than those provided by that ruling (as important as it was) will have to legislated for.

The big roadblock is the attempt to ascribe equal status to the mother and the embryo. If we stick with this then we are sticking with a circle that can never be squared.

The Catholic Church’s position is clear — human life begins at conception, which means that the fertilised ovum (just a collection of chemical elements) must be accorded the status of “personhood” with all the rights attached thereto.

To say that this entity — let’s just call it the embryo — constitutes a “life” from the very beginning that is somehow “equal” to that of the mother is just a fiction. Unless and until we face up to this and reject the fiction then we’ll continue to be imprisoned in the moral cul-de-sac created by the eighth amendment.

The authority of Rome, of course, will be invoked in defence of the eighth amendment. But Rome has been hopelessly wrong on contraception. From the moment Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, his 1968 encyclical condemning artificial contraception, it sparked a huge controversy resulting in the ignoring of it by millions of Catholics around the globe.

So dismayed was Paul VI by the hostility to the encyclical that for the remaining 10 years of his pontificate he never wrote another one.

Why should the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion be impervious to challenge? We have a duty (and this applies also and especially to our legislators) to follow our consciences, and not to surrender our own considered judgement to any dogma, even one carrying a papal stamp of approval.

The duty of legislators is to legislate for all citizens, not for any specific section. Above all in a Republic, they must not accord any special status or preferment to one (or any) religion.

The case for a brand new and rigorously secular constitution (something on which the forthcoming Constitutional Convention might have a view) is an argument for another day.

But providing for the free practice of religion (which is what Article 44 of the Constitution does) is a different matter altogether from conferring privileges on one religion.

It is now no longer enough for the Oireachtas to introduce legislation giving effect to the X case ruling, desirable as that is in itself. When legislators face the problem of introducing legislation that allows abortion, they must look beyond the X case.

When the next referendum on abortion comes around (and it is now a question of when not if), voters should focus on the tragic case of Savita Halappanavar. The question we should all ask ourselves is this: If she had been my wife or my daughter, what would I have been seeking?

Central to any new referendum must be the deletion of the eighth amendment, otherwise we simply perpetuate the fiction that the right to life of the unborn is equal to the right to life of the mother.

And unless that roadblock is removed, then it is only going to be a matter of time before we have another Savita Halappanavar-type tragedy.

Do we really want that?