Mary Kenny“It is… a dreadful thing to do to a woman. As it proved”, writes Mary Kenny
The date has now been set, in London, for the trial of the Marie Stopes doctor and nurses, following the death of an Irish resident Aisha Chithira in 2012 after an abortion.
Ms Chithira, who was 22 weeks pregnant, was discharged after this late abortion, and sent back to a friend’s house in a taxi. She subsequently died from internal bleeding and cardiac arrest.
We will see how the trial, due for March next year, proceeds, but as a general principle, I suggest that an abortion at 22 weeks contravenes the British law that an abortion should not take place where “a child [is] capable of being born alive”. It is now well established in medical practice that babies of 22 weeks have been born alive, and survived.
Even practiced abortionists themselves accept this. Dr Tim Black, one of the co-founders of Marie Stopes International – he died in December 2014 – was credited with the tag of having invented the “lunchtime abortion”, because he once boasted he could terminate a pregnancy during a woman’s lunchtime.
However, in later life, Tim Black began to question the abortion law, and in 2005, he stated publicly that abortions should not be carried out after 20 weeks.
This followed a TV documentary made by his daughter, Julia, in which she expressed her troubled feelings about having had an abortion when she was 21 years old.
I hope this evidence may be relevant at the forthcoming Marie Stopes trial: that an unborn at 22 weeks is capable of being born alive. It is also a dreadful thing to do to a woman. As it proved.
Private sins aired in public
There aren’t many people, I imagine, who would emerge smelling of roses if their private sins and failings were shouted from the rooftops: the modern equivalent being exposure by television, and subsequently, public cross-examination.
The former Arch-bishop of Benin City, Richard Burke, now aged 66, was certainly subjected to humiliating disclosures recently when he admitted his sexual relationship with Dolores Atwood during his case against RTÉ.
Ms Atwood claimed she was under-age at the time of their intimacy; Richard Burke claimed she was 19 or 20. He also admitted that he had given her €176,000 and stated that she had asked for €200,000.
The trial came to an end abruptly with no very clear public conclusion: and no one’s reputation edified by the revelations.
Celibacy is not an easy calling for most mortals, and it’s said that Africa is particularly challenging terrain in this regard – because the culture tends to affirm sexuality as part of nature. Some honest examination of this subject within that cultural context might be enlightening.
Enjoying a Latin revival
How refreshing to see that Latin is enjoying a fashionable revival. A former Latin tutor turned journalist, Harry Mount, published a simple and cheap Latin primer, Amo, Amas, Amat a few years ago, and it has since continually sparked interest in the classical language – and he is constantly asked to give public Latin tutorials.
I wish, now, I had taken Latin seriously in school, instead of – typically – considering it “boring old stuff”, of which I only seemed to absorb “mensa, mensa, mensam…”
But maybe it wasn’t approached in the right way in my schooldays: seen as a duty rather than as a fascinating route to virtually all other European languages, a great universal tongue, the language of the Church, and indeed sometimes of everyday life. My mother’s favourite phrase was: “Nil desperandum”, and I also heard a lot of (sometimes half-ironically, referring to something that seemed endless) “in secula saeculorum”. And I’ve now joined those enthused for Latin’s renewal: back to mensa, mensa, mensam…