Breda O'BrienFor those who have been taught how to think, it is important to speak up when challenged, writes Breda O’Brien
Here are two statements, both taken from speeches to be delivered at a debate about abortion culture. Your task is to guess which speaker a feminist student group wanted to ban.
Here’s the first: “I do think there are massive questions to be asked regarding when a foetus becomes fully human, but I don’t deny that a foetus is at least a potential human life and that abortion ends that potential human life. But I have made a moral judgment, and I’ve decided that it is worse – infinitely worse – to force a living, breathing, autonomous individual to do something against her will than it is to terminate an as-yet unformed, potential human life.
“That is the bottom line for me: the freedom and autonomy of a woman is more important than the continued existence of a foetus.”
Here’s the second: “Perhaps the greatest irony of this whole phenomenon is that while abortion was supposed to give women greater autonomy, we have evidence that it was being used in England by some families to terminate pregnancies entirely because the foetus was female.
“In other words, abortion was being used in such a way as to validate the medieval idea that girls are worth less than boys. Happily, this abuse looks set to be officially and explicitly outlawed for the first time.”
The answer? Both of them. And they succeeded in banning them – in Oxford University. Oxford Students for Life invited Brendan O’Neill and Tim Stanley to debate the subject ‘This House believes Britain’s Abortion Culture Hurts Us All’.
Cisgender
The Women’s Campaign (WomCam) declared: “It is absurd to think we should be listening to two cisgender men debate about what people with uteruses should be doing with their bodies.”
For those of you not quite up to speed, ‘cisgender’ means people who are happy with the gender they were born with. The ‘people with uteruses’ is there because according to Niamh McIntyre, a student objecting to the holding of the debate, abortion affects “women, trans and non-binary people every day”.
Yes, Brendan O’Neill may be an eloquent advocate for the right to choose, and be a Marxist to boot, but he has no right to speak on abortion because he is a cisgender male.
Not too long ago, Ann Furedi, director of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), was barracked by female students for participating in an abortion debate in Cambridge, and was understandably stunned.
But at least she got to speak. Her comrade from Spiked Online, Brendan O’Neill, was not given that courtesy in Oxford.
Niamh McIntyre defended the ban in the London Independent. “In organising against this event, I did not stifle free speech.
“As a student, I asserted that it would make me feel threatened in my own university; as a woman, I objected to men telling me what I should be allowed to do with my own body.”
She also claimed that there are plenty of platforms for pro-life people, so she was not preventing free speech.
A little like a totalitarian government claiming that there are plenty of democracies, so it is not stifling free speech by banning it in its own country.
She went on: “The idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalised groups.”
Certainly, if Oxford Students for Life were proposing, say, assaults on transgender people, that would be an appropriate response.
But the debate was not even about whether abortion should be legal – but about the effects of abortion culture.
One effect, apparently, of the ready availability of abortion is that it makes students at what is allegedly one of the foremost educational institutions in Britain feel ‘unsafe’ if anyone questions any aspect of abortion.
Brendan O’Neill is a controversial contrarian, but it is probably understandable why he described those who banned him as ‘Stepford students’, a reference to the brainwashed, zombie-like women in the movie, The Stepford Wives.
In Ireland, we have our own intolerance of difference. Indeed, O’Neill was condemned by students in University College Cork for speaking at a debate against gay marriage. Fr David Barrins OP has spoken about the intolerance he found at UCC, for example, stating that there is active opposition to Catholic groups or to societies which take stances associated with Catholicism, such as pro-life groups.
Funding
In Trinity College Dublin, the Laurentian Society is only allowed to exist and receive funding if it discusses cultural aspects of Catholicism, but is not allowed to promote Catholicism per se.
It is ironic, and not a little scary, that people are so unwilling to have their values challenged that they are willing to sacrifice the right to free speech, all while attending universities that pride themselves on teaching people to think.