Mary Kenny
The scene at Dublin Castle as the Referendum result became known on Saturday last. There were many who found the street celebrations after the abortion referendum somewhat distasteful, and this extended to the British media, even among those who endorsed Repeal.
In the Daily Mail, Richard Littlejohn wrote that “while the Irish referendum result is welcome, I found the near hysterical reaction to it pretty nauseating”.
A correspondent to the Daily Telegraph, Marilyn Parrott of Cheshire, wrote: “It was sad to see the jubilation of so many at the result of the referendum in Ireland, which can only lead to many more abortions.”
Even Libby Purves in The Times, who supported Repeal conceded that “the campaigners’ rejoicing may seem odd with a topic so painful: nobody likes the idea of abortion or hopes to need one”.
I will not, however, condemn or judge those young women laughing, cheering and holding up clenched fists in the ‘right-on’ Marxist victory sign. I probably participated in similarly inappropriate street demos myself when young: it’s easy to get carried away by a kind of mob excitement in these situations.
Campaign
The end of any campaign can bring a kind of ‘post-war fever’. The end of a war itself is marked by hugely triumphalist victory parades: only afterwards do people turn their thoughts to the awful cost, and the many dead and wounded victims of war.
Only the passage of time brings reflection, because time brings experience, and the life lesson that events seldom turn out as anticipated. Among that celebratory crowd will be women – and men – whose life experiences in the future will prompt rueful thoughts about celebrating the right to abortion.
There will be women who will find, after all their abrasive demands for ‘reproductive rights’, that – as someone I know experienced – it took 11 miscarriages before she could bring a live baby to term. There will be men, told they are to be a father, are then devastated when a wife or girlfriend informs them she intends to terminate the pregnancy. There will be couples who spend thousands of euro to pay for repeated cycles of IVF.
There will be women who – again I cite another case I know – are reproached by their own daughter-in-law for upholding abortion rights: “If the birth mother of our adopted child had had an abortion, we wouldn’t have the chance to be parents today. Don’t be so insensitive on this issue!”
There will, in the senior years, be men and women who are disappointed at not becoming grandparents – because their own daughter has terminated a pregnancy since it didn’t fit in with her lifestyle. They’ll say nothing about it to anyone, but the sadness will be in there in their hearts.
There will be men and women who lose an only child to a fatal illness – leukaemia, in another awful case that I have known – and then repine, for the rest of their lives, over an abortion decision they made in a second pregnancy.
Yes, there will be individuals who have no regrets about celebrating abortion rights or even abortion decisions. People are varied in their responses to any issue, including any moral idea. It is human to justify one’s own values – what a late friend of mine called “preaching what they practice”.
But life takes us all on a journey of twists and turns, and many a high-spirited street demo of youth is recollected later on in quite a different light.
Be careful of offering hostages to fortune.
Benefit of hindsight makes Jilly feel a bit silly
Fifty years ago, the novelist Jilly Cooper [pictured] wrote a book called How to Stay Married, which made all kinds of breezy recommendations, such as that a good wife should keep a tidy house and please her husband with fine cooking – “if you keep the house in a mess, and serve vile food, he has every right to complain”, and that a wife shouldn’t spend too much time nattering on the phone to her mother, as this will make her husband jealous.
A wife, wrote Jilly, should do the housework when her husband isn’t looking so as to make it look effortless. A wife should always look attractive in bed – eschewing curlers or night cream, which are “grounds for divorce”. And a husband is justified in “straying” if his wife isn’t enthusiastic about conjugal rights, she averred.
She is now horrified at what she wrote, and describes her early self as “a smug, opinionated, proselytising little know-it-all”.
She was also publicly humiliated as, for all her nostrums, her late husband, Leo, did “stray”, and was disclosed as having a mistress over the course of six years.
When asked why her perfect marriage formula didn’t keep him faithful on BBC Woman’s Hour, she was simply dumbstruck and couldn’t talk about it.
Leo Cooper later developed Parkinson’s Disease and Jilly cared for him tirelessly throughout the long years of his helplessness.
Perhaps he, too, learned some life lessons in the end.