David QuinnChanging our Constitution will introduce a permissive regime of abortion, writes David Quinn
Bit by bit, a new abortion referendum is being put on the political agenda. This time, the pressure isn’t for an amendment that will close the loophole in our pro-life law that was created by the X case. This time, it is to remove the pro-life clause in our Constitution completely and leave the matter entirely up to our legislators.
A poll in last weekend’s Sunday Independent indicates that 56% of the electorate are “personally in favour of holding a referendum to repeal the eighth amendment, which cur rently gives equal right to life to the mother and the foetus”.
The polls also shows that 60% of the public support abortion where there is a threat of the mother’s suicide, 69% support it in cases of rape and 68% support abortion where there is a “long-term threat” to the health of the mother.
If these figures are accurate, then the pro-life movement in Ireland is in deep trouble.
But let’s not panic just yet. Opinion polls are consistently shown to be both accurate and misleading at the same time.
They are accurate enough in that they get a read on the public mood at a given moment. But they can be highly misleading because public opinion is often very volatile.
Majority
This has been shown time and again. The Oireachtas inquiries referendum was supposed to pass by a landslide and was defeated.
The public was meant to favour abolition of the Seanad, but that was defeated as well, and a stupendous 70% majority of the public favoured the children’s rights referendum but, in the end, that passed by a fairly narrow 16%, despite the fact that the no campaign had virtually no money and no organisation.
What opinion polls generally show is the effect of media conditioning on public opinion at a given time on a given issue.
The media uniformly favoured the children’s rights amendment but, when people began hearing counter-arguments, minds began to change.
The proposal to give Oireachtas inquiries more power seemed to make sense until it dawned on the public that the inquiries could easily resemble kangaroo courts in which politicians would take the opportunity to grandstand in order to grab a few headlines.
The Seanad referendum was defeated because the public doesn’t trust our political class very much and the abolition of an admittedly weak second chamber simply looked like another power grab.
The reason the media and our politicians are nervous about next year’s referendum on same-sex marriage is because they know public opinion can turn fast when it is exposed to counter-arguments to which the media in the run-up to a referendum only give the tiniest platform.
On the issue of same-sex marriage, the public have been subjected to incessant propaganda.
The same applies to the abortion issue. Most members of the public believe Savita Halappanavar died because she was denied an abortion, whereas what really happened is that her medical team didn’t spot she was developing a deadly infection until it was too late.
The media never gave the medical reports revealing this fact anything like the publicity they gave to the notion that she died because of our abortion law.
Many members of the public believe that the migrant woman who recently was in the news after her baby was delivered three months early because she was deemed to be suicidal would have been better served if she had an abortion instead.
That is, they would prefer that the baby was dead rather than alive, albeit with a very high chance of being disabled because he or she was delivered so prematurely.
Also, many members of the public believe that if a woman is pregnant and her baby is fatally handicapped, it is better that she should have an abortion.
This perception has taken hold because the media have not given enough publicity to women who brought their fatally handicapped babies to term and are delighted they gave their child its chance at life, no matter how short that was.
In each of the sort of scenarios above, critics of the pro-life amendment to the Constitution say that, if it was removed, we would no longer be faced with our law getting in the way of what they think needs to be done for those women.
Remove the eighth amendment, they say, and our politicians can then pass a more ‘rational’ abortion law that will produce fewer controversies than the present one.
What would happen if the eighth amendment was removed? There is not the slightest doubt that, within 10 or so years, we would move towards a permissive, British-style abortion law.
At first, we would be offered a fairly restrictive abortion law by our politicians in order to reassure the public that they weren’t doing anything too ‘extreme’.
Amendment
But bit by bit, they would amend that law until a provision was introduced allowing abortion when the ‘health’ of the mother, physical or mental, was endangered. This is the provision that has led to abortion-on-demand in Britain and one in five pregnancies there ending in abortion annually, coming to a total of almost 200,000 abortions each year.
No matter what kind of abortion law we have, there will always be hard cases. Britain’s permissive regime had led to a situation where a baby can be aborted merely for having a cleft palate and the ‘health’ ground for abortion is really a convenience ground.
Our abortion law saves lives. If our abortion rate was as high as Britain’s, thousands of adults living out their lives in our country today, would be dead instead.
Bear in mind, also, that our maternal death rate is lower than Britain’s, so our pro-life law and culture (badly weakened by the passage of last year’s abortion law) saves both women’s lives and the lives of babies.
If we delete the eighth amendment, it will be a huge breakthrough for what St John Paul II called “the culture of death”.