I was a pretty sensitive child, so when I heard that babies were being murdered in their thousands, and that this was absolutely legal, I was horrified.
Murdering babies couldn’t possibly be something that was happening, surely? And some people agreed with it?
It turned out that, by “murdering babies”, my school and my church meant that women and people who found themselves pregnant when they did not want to be, or could not safely be, were exercising their right to choose and ending their pregnancies. No babies, no murder. Just a medical procedure terminating a pregnancy.
But it took me a long time to realise that.
At school, we watched a particularly distressing video called The Silent Scream. My main memory of it is of a termination being carried out with an ultrasound scan surveying the womb. There were also black plastic bags full of bloodied, dead foetuses.
I had absorbed the “murdered babies” message hook, line and sinker and was distraught to see these things portrayed on the screen. It seemed brutal and heartless. I joined SPUC, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, and wore a little badge that showed the size of a foetus’s feet at 12 weeks gestation. I leafleted my street (apologies to my former neighbours) and – thankfully – didn’t get to any actual demonstrations. They were happening then, in the ’80s and ’90s, although not to the degree that they are today and not, as far as I know, outside clinics. The ones I remember involved people lining the streets with pro-life signs that car drivers and passengers could see as they drove past.
Pro-life. That’s a funny word, really, when you have a wider view of what this campaigning is about. Anti-choice is more appropriate; forced birther even more so. But, as a teen, being pro-life sounded like exactly what I thought I was fighting for. The right of these innocent foetuses to be born and live their life.
And what a life, with parents who did not want them? Or with a parent who might die because they are born? Or being born just to immediately die? Because these are some of the myriad reasons people seek abortions: the child is unwanted; pregnancy and birth might kill the parent; the foetus may not be viable.
But I had learned the pro-life spiel and I believed its message. Unwanted children can be adopted! Even if you think your baby might die at birth you just never know – surely it deserves a chance!
As for the most compelling arguments – in which a pregnancy is the result of rape, or in which the parent might die giving birth – I even had objections to terminations in those circumstances.
The arguments went as follows:
- If a pregnancy was the result of rape, then having an abortion would add an extra trauma to the parent on top of what they have already been through. Plus, why punish the baby for the sins of its father?
- If pregnancy or birth will kill the parent, they have at least had a chance at life. It’s the baby’s turn, now!
It pains me to write down what was in effect a justification for absolute horror and I am sorry to anybody I actually spoke to about this at the time. The indoctrination was strong and I absorbed every word.
The Catholic Church has a lot to answer for. I overcame my indoctrination as I entered adulthood and met women who had real-life unplanned pregnancies and who were not, to my surprise, monsters and murderers when they terminated them. I learned that “abortion damages women too, because it traumatises them!” is not the norm, and that this was a pretend argument to counter the feminists fighting the good fight.
The Catholic Church is also an incredibly powerful force in Ireland, which is today voting on whether or not to repeal the 8th amendment, which, if passed, would allow people to have terminations without having to travel to England or break the law by seeking them out in Ireland on the downlow.
Women, and others with uteruses, need this to pass. They need to leave the days of having to get a plane and have a lonely procedure in a place they do not know, without the support of those who love them, behind. They need to be able to get abortion pills from their doctors, not from a stranger on the internet who may or may not have good intentions. They need to be able to get life-saving treatment for themselves, even if this will compromise an embryo. They need to not die of sepsis because a foetus that has no chance of life is still in their womb.
The vote is happening today, and people are travelling home from around the world to have their say. The anti-abortion lobby in Ireland is powerful and it is impossible to predict which way the vote will go.
But I, like millions of pro-choicers around the world, are watching to see what the result will be. And, if I was still Catholic, I would be praying for fairness, not oppression, and hoping for the repeal of the 8th amendment.
Photo: Neil Markey/Creative Commons