Marriage Equality Referendum is about respect for different family units

Anne Ferris says society shunning certain types of family unit is as wrong and potentially damaging as it was when her teen pregnancy was hushed up 40 years ago

Mon, 06 Apr, 2015 - 01:00

Anne Ferris

MY abiding memory of my 16- year-old pregnant self is a very simple one. Every time a neighbour came to our front door in north Dublin, my mother pushed me out the back door to wait in the garden until the neighbour had left. When my baby girl was born and placed into adoption, the instructions at home were equally simple and to the point: “We will never discuss this again.”

I have much to be grateful to my parents for, and high on that list is their decision not to send me away to an institution, as was the fate of so many unmarried mothers in Ireland. But the feelings of shame, the knowledge of being one of society’s outcasts, knowing that through gaps in closed curtains I was being pointed out as the girl who had a fatherless baby, those feelings stayed with me for a very long time.

The act of putting me out in the back garden was, in my mother’s eyes, a protective act. She most likely believed that she was shielding me from the gaze of nosey neighbours. But in their insistence that we hide my unmarried pregnancy, and then hide away my fatherless child by placing her in adoption, my parents, with undoubtedly good motives and intentions for me, were doing their part in upholding a cruel and heartless system that prioritised the ‘married mother and father family’ over all others.

Looking back, none of it makes sense. From today’s perspective, where one third of Irish family households do not have a mother and father living under the same roof, the past seems a very mad place indeed. Most people in modern Irish society accept that the traditional model of married mothers and fathers is not always the guaranteed passport to childhood happiness and lifelong success it was once held up to be, and that children can prosper in all types of family structures.

For all of these reasons and more, it both saddened and angered me to read Margaret Hickey’s opinion piece in the Irish Examiner (April 3, 2015).

For me it was a very sad thing to read in a 21st century Irish newspaper that there are still mothers and fathers out there who could have grave difficulty explaining to their children the concept of a married gay family. More than 40 years ago, removing me and my ‘illegitimate’ baby from public sight was the way society had for avoiding questions that contradicted the accepted family norms. We now know the damage to society that was inflicted by treating certain women and children in this discriminatory way. Margaret Hickey in effect implies that what she refers to as “two-mom families” and “two-dad families” should also be hidden from view.

She says “very young children just grasp the fact that mothers and fathers come in the singular, unlike aunts and grandparents” and claims this will jeopardise the “moral education” of children in the more acceptable mother-father family model. I’m sure these are Ms Hickey’s honestly-held beliefs, just as my mother undoubtedly had my best interests at heart in keeping me out of neighbours’ way all those years ago. But the attitude of shunning from society certain types of family unit is as wrong and potentially damaging now as it was then.

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As a legislator, one aspect of Margaret Hickey’s piece left me with a feeling of outright anger. The kindest thing I can say is that Ms Hickey was being ‘mischievous’ when she put forward the view that a majority ‘no’ in the upcoming referendum would effectively place a legal barrier in front of the Children and Family Relationships Bill that is currently making its way through the Oireachtas. This outrageous claim has no legitimate basis whatsoever.

The Irish Supreme Court has a long history of respecting the legislative power of the Oireachtas. Each and every Act of the Oireachtas comes with a legal presumption of constitutionality, a very high barrier indeed to overturn. Only in extremely rare occasions has legislation enacted by the Irish parliament been overturned by the courts. To play the card that the outcome of the marriage equality referendum will dictate the outcome of legislation on surrogacy or adoption is misleading and downright inaccurate.

There are already ‘two-mom’ and ‘two-dad’ Irish families. As Margaret Hickey concedes, there are already married Irish families with children born through surrogacy. The Children and Family Relationships Bill is not inventing any new scientific practices or any new family units. It will, though, place regulatory controls on methods of assisted reproduction that already exist. That can only be a good thing.

The family, as defined in the Constitution, includes families with no children at all. Marriage in Irish law has never been conditional on the procreation of children. This idea that voting ‘no’ would somehow restrict ‘the family’ to just heterosexual couples with children is not held up by the reality of the law or the reality of Irish life.

The referendum is about those two core things Margaret Hickey professes to support: Equality and love. And, I would venture, respect for difference. If society 40 years ago had that same respect for difference, Ireland would have been a much kinder place for people like me who didn’t fit into ‘the norm.’