David Quinn
The referendum is in reality about abortion on demand, writes David Quinn
This abortion referendum is not primarily about the hard cases such as rape and ‘fatal foetal abnormality’. Under the planned law, the vast majority of abortions will take place on the healthy babies or healthy women. That is what we are really being asked to vote for.
It is very important to state this because there is plenty of anecdotal evidence being picked up on the canvass and elsewhere that many voters believe the referendum is mainly about the exceptional cases. Some of the voters who think this way appear to be Mass-goers.
The pro-choice side in the campaign, aided by and abetted by an almost chronically biased media, have been concentrating almost entirely on the hard cases. In almost every debate, at every press conference, in every interview, they talk overwhelmingly about the hard cases.
Debate
I listened to a debate on Cork radio last week between Dr Louise Kenny and Dr Andrew O’Regan. Dr Kenny favours repeals of the Eighth. She spoke almost non-stop about the hard cases and greatly overstated the dangers posed by the Eighth Amendment to the lives and health of pregnant women in Ireland.
As Dr O’Regan painstakingly pointed out, the record shows we have one of the lowest maternal death rates in the world, and that we also have low levels of poor health as a result of pregnancy compared with other Western countries.
The best Dr Kenny could offer in response is that Britain acts as a “safety valve” for Ireland, meaning we can send our hard cases there. But if Britain, because of its liberal abortion law, is a safer place for pregnant women than why isn’t its maternal death rate lower than ours? It’s not. It’s usually higher, just like in the US which also has a liberal abortion law.
But of course, Ireland is vastly safer for the baby in the womb than either Britain or America. In Britain there is one abortion for every four births, a staggering number.
In Ireland, there is about one abortion for every 13 births, which is far lower and is derived after taking into account the number of Irish women who travel to England each year for a termination and the estimates given by pro-choice campaigners for use of the abortion pill. By the way, the abortion pill is very different from most pharmaceutical products, whose aim is to heal. This is a pill whose sole purpose is to kill. What doctor in good conscience could ever hand out a pill that will kill one of his or her patients?
The reason the pro-choice side talk incessantly about the exceptional cases is because they tug at the heartstrings, which is entirely understandable, but also because they distract from their real intention which is to introduce a permissive abortion regime. The exceptional cases are being used to allow for every other case, and those cases have nothing to do with health, properly understood.
On Prime Time last week, Fine Gael’s Josepha Madigan much as admitted this. She said the planned law will bring Ireland into line with 21 out of 28 European countries. In other words, the planned law will not be restrictive.
The proposed law will allow abortion in the first 12 weeks for any reason. The woman does not have to say her life or health is at risk or that her baby will die. She simply has to say she wants an abortion. Then, after a 72-hour wait, she can have her deadly abortion pill, a pill that results each and every time in a tiny dead body to be disposed of. Remember again, this is a pill that kills.
After that, she can obtain an abortion on nebulous health grounds, just like in Britain and just like in many other European countries.
Among the 21 countries we would be brought into line with should the Eighth Amendment be repealed are France and Denmark.
They permit abortion for any reason up to 12 weeks and after that on ‘health’ grounds. But no-one pretends the law in France and Denmark is in any way restrictive in practice. Almost no abortions are refused in those countries and almost none will be refused here either.
This is also likely to be the case where the baby suffers from a non-fatal disability like Down Syndrome. The Government has made a big play about the fact that a non-fatal disability will not be a ground for abortion. But a disability of any kind is not a ground for abortion in Germany and yet the disabled there are aborted wholesale anyway, under the ‘mental health’ of the mother ground.
Proposal
If the Government stuck to the 12-week proposal only, the proposed law would still be tantamount to abortion-on-demand because 90% of abortions take place in the first three months of pregnancy. So that provision alone means that in the vast majority of cases abortions will take place on the healthy babies of healthy women.
The fall-back position of pro-choice campaigners is that the abortions are taking place anyway, so they might as well happen here under the watchful eye of doctors. This, however, is a counsel of despair and it makes liberal abortion laws overseas our standard.
It says that because Irish women are availing of liberal abortion laws overseas (overwhelmingly in Britain), we must have a liberal abortion law here.
On that basis, our laws should be changed in line with whatever is permitted overseas, no matter how awful the law in in question is. Therefore, if Britain one day permits assisted suicide, and Irish people are availing of this, then we must have assisted suicide as well.
The reality is that it is not our law which is at fault. It is Britain’s law. It has reduced the unborn child to nothing. We are now being invited, in effect, to do the same, and in the name of the hard cases.
Many people do want abortion to be available in those hard cases, but that is not what we will be voting for on May 25. The Government has put an entirely different proposal before us. If we vote for repeal, we are voting for a law that will, in practice, be extremely permissive and go far beyond the exceptional cases.