Outgoing Government put ‘choice’ before children

A return of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition will further damage traditional values, writes David Quinn

The social liberalism of the outgoing Government cannot be exaggerated. The same is likely to be true of the incoming Government, unless it is a Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil coalition, and even then it will be only somewhat less liberal.

When I say ‘liberal’, it needs to be made perfectly clear what I mean by this. I certainly don’t mean ‘liberal’ in the sense of favouring limited government. ‘Liberal’ today usually means promoting personal autonomy at practically all costs.

Modern liberalism is about making everyone equally free to pursue their own life-goals in their own way. The big losers in this pursuit are children.

The issue of abortion highlights this most starkly. If people are to be free, so the thinking goes, then they must be able to make whatever choices they like, so long as no-one is harmed.

This is why liberals talk about the ‘right to choose’. This includes the right to choose to kill the child in the womb.

Liberals refuse to accept that anyone is harmed when this happens because they refuse to accept that the life in the womb is human, or if they do accept it is human, they believe its life is worth less than the right of the mother not to be a mother. Her right to choose is considered greater than the baby’s right to life.

Here we see modern liberalism at is most extreme; it is absolutely prepared to sacrifice human lives in the name of ‘choice’.  This is the extent to which they have placed ‘choice’ on a pedestal.

Ideology

It is why abortion has now become such a big issue again. The pro-life amendment to our Constitution stands in the way of the ideology of ‘choice’ and so it must be repealed. Women are told they have a right to kill the developing human life in their womb. They are told it is an affront if they cannot do this. They are told it is their body even when the baby in their womb is patently not their body. Rather it is in their body.

This kind of thinking means that the womb has become the least safe place for a baby. It lives or dies according to the choice of the person who ought to be most protective towards it, namely the mother.

Enda Kenny refuses to stand over the pro-life clause in our Constitution, namely the Eighth Amendment. He wants another ‘constitutional convention’ to consider the issue. He cannot bring himself to say that be believes in the equal right to life of all human beings.

Labour insists it will make another abortion referendum a condition of entering Government. Sinn Féin favour repeal of the 8th amendment. So do the Social Democrats, the Anti-Austerity Alliance and People Before Profit. Fianna Fáil and Renua have no position one way or the other.

The extent to which our politics now places choice above the interests of children was also starkly revealed last year through the passage of the Children and Family Relationships Act and the marriage referendum.

You may well be old-fashioned enough to think that nature makes you a parent, that is, when you give birth to your child, or your wife/partner gives birth to your child, you are a parent automatically, like it or not.

That isn’t how the outgoing Government or any of the opposition parties see it. They believe you become a parent only when you choose to be a parent. Again we see the ideology of choice at work.

Law

This allows our law to say that a surrogate mother can give birth to a child but give that child away to someone else, possibly in return for a payment. She does not want to be the mother, even though she is the birth mother, and therefore the law will recognise her choice.

It allows a man to sell his sperm to a fertility clinic, or a woman to do the same with her eggs, and not be considered to be the parents of any resultant child because they do not want to be that child’s parents, even though they are clearly the child’s biological parents. Again, choice trumps nature.

This ideology of choice means the ‘real’ parents are considered to be those who want the child, who have placed an order for the child, as it were, in the sense of purchasing sperm and/or an egg and/or the womb of a surrogate.

The commissioning adults (who could be a man and a woman, two men or two women) may only provide the womb that gestates the child, or perhaps only the egg, or the sperm only, but both will be recognised in law as the ‘real’ parents of the child because that is what they want, that is what they choose.

When we voted for same-sex marriage, we effectively voted for all this and now Leo Varadkar has said the State will fund the lot of it.

The child, of course, may see things completely differently from the law. The law may say that nature does not make you a parent, only ‘choice’ or ‘intent’ does that, but many children of sperm donors or egg donors are now in adulthood and are rightly insisting that the sperm donor is their father and the egg donor is their mother, no matter what the law says.

Choices

They wonder why we thought the choices of the adults were so important that we could overlook this ineradicable fact.

The outgoing Government may think it is pro-child because it passed a children’s rights referendum early in its lifetime. That referendum increased the power of the State and did very little to help children.

Now we hear that the Government wants to make it easier for people to get divorced. At present the Constitution requires that a couple be separated for four years before they can divorce.

Again, the interests of adults are being put first. Making divorce easier is very unlikely to serve the interests of children. Some might say it’s better for the children if an unhappy couple can go their separate ways. But the four year wait before they divorce doesn’t stop them separating in the meantime.

Perhaps the difficulty in getting divorced is one reason for Ireland’s low divorce rate?

Irish politics is now so unbalanced – and the unbalanced nature of our media makes things even worse – that there is little pushback against the ideology of choice. The interests of children who are so often the victims of this ideology, are not being properly protected.

The Enda Kenny-led Government super-charged the ideology of choice. They saw little opposition to it so that raced on with it heedless to the consequences. Those of us who have the real interests of children at heart must become better at defending those interests.