Maybe the Catholics should have a talk with God about why He aborts so many "unborn children."
Once the embryo reaches the blastocyst stage, approximately five to six days after fertilization, it hatches out of its zona pellucida and begins the process of implantation in the uterus.
In nature, 50 percent of all fertilized eggs are lost before a woman's missed menses.
https://www.ucsfhealth.org/education/conception_how_it_works/
20
Maureen, I hoped for something more than the same-old, same-old boogeyman anecdotes in this column, but got what I expected from your same-old, same-old liberal arguments. I know that you are an intelligent person, so I thought perhaps you had something new to offer on this subject. It is strictly boilerplate.
5
Why is it there is never a discussion on preventing unwanted pregnancies. It's always after the fact. There's over a million unwanted pregnancies that result in abortions in this country every year! There are two givens in life- people will have sex for reasons other than conception n women will get an abortion if they want one. No law can change that. Pass out condoms to teenagers so they can learn safe sex. Most abortions are for women between the ages of 18-25. Abstinence isn't an realistic option. If a woman is facing an unwanted pregnancy offer her incentives to bring the baby to term. Free prenatal n postnatal medical care, subsidized housing, free day care n free tuition. We put a gun to a woman's head n tell her she can't abort then we wipe our hands when the baby's born n tell her she's on her own it's her fault. Let's make it a non issue by reducing significantly unwanted pregnancies. BTW isn't it hypocritical to be pro life but make exceptions? What difference is it to the unborn fetus whether the mother was raped by her father or the mothers health is in danger.
12
Fortunately, I never had an unwanted pregnancy. That is a woman’s dilemma. My experience has told me that men don’t take much responsibility for the results of casual sexual encounters. I would not want to interfere with another woman’s decision. But I don’t think I would terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
Men have no business influencing women’s decisions when they don’t care whether they get a woman pregnant or not. Let the men be the shamed ones.
16
I am alive because abortion was illegal when I was born and my Irish birth mother placed me for adoption. If I had been aborted because society believed my life was not worth a few months of inconvenience, my daughter would not exist.
I also find it odd that U.S. liberals are outraged by Russia's attempted interference in the U.S. election but think nothing of telling Irish voters what to do.
26
Ireland is a curious, beautiful land of contradictions, craic and gravitas, the Google hub and the sad and joyful pubs. On a recent visit I saw the pro and con posters of the abortion debate from Dublin to Galway to Sligo including the tiny towns in between you pass in a blink.
In conversations, I got the sense the Irish will eliminate the ban on abortion, primarily due to a more energized pro-choice voter base. But I also believe that, once it passes, many of those who voted against it will be relieved to know the women of Ireland will finally take control of their body. It's a Catholic thing. Many understand the abortion issue. They just don't want to be on record voting for it. It's one of those contradictions you see in Ireland.
12
I have never understood why someone's choice to abort a pregnancy is someone else's business, especially when the life of the mother is threatened. We are not killing children when we talk about a fetus. We are not guaranteed that a fetus will go full term enough to be a viable birth.
It is a matter of choice just as going to church is a choice. Just as believing what you believe is a choice. When it comes to someone else's body that is not your choice.
Women in Ireland deserve the same choices and risks as women here have. There are restrictions on abortion for a reason. But the choice is the mother's.
If getting into heaven is the reason others want to keep women from their choice then I say live your life according to your faith and heaven awaits you but don't meddle otherwise. A baby who is born inherits rights and becomes protected as we all are. Women who wish to tend to their own health and bodies should have rights too.
Honestly, isn't it time for all to have safe healthcare and the choice of what that is?
31
How about actually helping these women, and I mean they need more than a bag of diapers and baby formula? How about seeing them as valuable human beings? Who should be protected from abuse. And then let’s talk about protecting fetuses.
21
Only humans have the religiously inflamed capacity to do evil under the delusion that they are doing good. Only humans invest a biologically programmed appetite whose practical purpose is the perpetuation of the species with the significance of a holy ritual, and anoint the random, unpredictable formation of a zygote that sometimes results as the willful act of a non-existent deity. Anyone with the courage to venture outside the delusion of religiously inspired dogma recognizes this biological process as just another aspect of the benign indifference of the universe.
Among mammals (excepting monotremes), it is the female who gets stuck with a dilemma if an unwanted/unplanned/unexpected conception occurs. The religiously inspired response is to severely restrict or completely forbid her options to rectify a mistake with life-changing consequences, as if her sensibilities in the matter were irrelevant, forcing her into servitude as an incubator in the service of values she may not even share. Take that description out of the context of procreation, strip it of self-righteous religious delusion, and you are looking at an ugly reality: slavery.
Nobody contemplates the termination of a pregnancy with joy or celebration. It is a difficult decision, and will take its place among many troubling experiences and memories all sentient beings accumulate over a lifetime. The last thing the woman needs is the state barging into that decision. It belongs to the woman, and to no one else.
30
Nice to see you on the proper side of an issue for a change.
7
This is such an easy one.
As different people have said for 50 years or more:
If men could get pregnant, abortion would be legal.
42
If genetic fathers were obliged by law to provide financial support for all children they sire, that might be equally effective.
10
In a country outlawing abortion:
-- Rich women leave to get abortions.
-- Poor women go to back-alley butchers.
You can't stop abortion, but you can make it more expensive, painful, and deadly.
But we non-pregnant people, especially impregnable people, will decide for them: Our ethics override their personal choices concerning their own bodies.
In democracies, tyranny of the majority is rarely aborted: A workable system, it nonetheless can often provide power to the powerful.
20
Under the theory of the US Constitution, minority rights are protected by limiting the powers the majority can exercise.
3
A difficult issue.
I've noticed these past few days women give birth to princesses and school shooters, frightening presidents and lovely athletes, country store clerks and truck drivers who sing on long hauls.
As I said, a difficult issue.
My belief?
I think that if there is a realm beyond this everyday realm we inhabit, that any soul wishing to be born will take birth no matter how many times it was aborted prior to its ultimate delivery.
No punishment, please!
Choice, please!
15
Soon this country will be sinking backwards into this cruel mire. Evangelical judges, Legislatures and a President willing to pander for power, are already working hard to strip away every right American women have over their own bodies.
Red States, in varying degrees, are forcing women to give birth already. How long will it be before Federal Laws are changed and Supreme Court decisions are overturned?
Elections have dire consequences.
Vote Blue 2018
34
The solution is so simple it boggles the mind!
Require biological fathers (we know who you are) to provide financial support until the age of 18.
13
• She helped a young woman who had slipped up and gotten ['mysteriously'] pregnant by making her swollen belly disappear with no pain.
She served her a tankard of beer, right?
FYI:
Most of what is known about 'Saint' Brigid of Kildare was her mastery of brewing.
She is a patron saint of brewers – she turned water into beer.Also of dairy maids, cattle, midwives and Irish nuns.
"I should like a great lake of ale, for the King of the Kings. I should like the family of Heaven to be drinking it through time eternal.”
~ Brigid of Kildare
451-525 CE
One of Ireland's patron saints, Irish hagiography makes her an early Irish Christian nun, abbess, and founder of several monasteries of nuns. Brigid's feast day falls on 1 February, the date of Imbolg, the pagan festival of spring.
She founded a school of arts.
She shares her name with an Irish goddess, which suggests her stories may be a retelling of Celtic myth. There's no clear evidence that she existed at all.
Legend has it that when a nun became pregnant, Brigid made the baby painlessly disappear. This led to her being celebrated as "Ireland's first abortionist", THE PATRON SAINT OF IRISH ABORTIONISTS.
Did your dad know?
Yet today, they're still debating abortion. So much for Catholic myths!
~ RC.
Born godless, raised Catholic, Jesuit educated, reborn atheist, free from religion, good without gods. Amen!
15
The Jesuit order harbors many Roman Catholic atheists. What does that say about what they think Jesus must have preached?
2
just in case there really is a Gawd, I have no idea what such a Being's actual views on abortion would be.
But I do know that if Jesus is anything like as advertised, He's gonna have a few choice words for some folks about the hatred, denial of free will, disdain for scientific facts, infantile conception of faith, and smug self-righteousness that regularly comes flying off the "pro-life," crowd.
Judge not lest ye be judged, I hear. Or maybe just follow the current Pope's example of stating opposition, offering help, and skipping the lying and the holier-than-thou?
23
Most of the public debate on abortion is unforgivably outdated, here and in Ireland. We’re still arguing over the role of the courts, when the real question is the role of the health care system.
Should physicians be testing fetuses for signs of brain activity before making medical decisions that affect them? What role should medical need play in the distribution of medical resources?
Is it ethical to offer fetal surgery and termination as alternatives to one another? What diagnoses are indications for termination, and does that depend on the availability of alternative therapy?
This is the real territory on which the decisive questions will be addressed. No court is ever going to solve this.
6
Is it even ethical to bring into the world a person whose known disabilities before birth will lead to a life of pain and exclusion from normal activities and pleasures?
6
Hopefully the Irish will vote no on the referendum on Friday to keep Ireland from becoming an abortion country. But the good news is that if they do not win, there will be Irish pro life groups who will be out in force keeping vigil in front of the abortion clinics.
We have seen pro life movements being responsible for assisting in the closing of abortion clinics in the US. We have seen many of them go out of business and replaced by pregnancy centers that are far superior and assist women in every area but provide abortions.
The pro lifers will convene in Ireland and get the movement started. This will take a bit of effort but they will be successful. They will not let innocent fetuses/babies be lost to abortion. There will many who will step up to the plate and take part. I will gladly volunteer my services for this very important task if necessary.
3
What is ProLife about letting a pregnant woman die of sepsis?
39
What an atrocious invasion of privacy the screamers at clinics have come to be.
16
Sigh. It is far more complicated than “volunteering.” It is the entirety of the child’s life. I have a friend who “volunteers” at a pro-life place where they pass out diapers and formula. At the end of her shift she goes home to her McMansion—when she’s not flying around the country with her lawyer spouse. Someone else cleans her house and cuts her lawn. A child’s life encompasses every single aspect; clothing, education, shoes, haircuts, glasses, underwear, moral formation, transportation, more education, laundry, bedding, clean clothing, more haircuts, socks, books, towels, blankets, psychological and emotional needs, food and more food, pillows and toys. The pro-life movement must be far more realistic and stop throwing the diaper, formula answer at every single unplanned pregnancy. Until you have hugged and held a child who is soaked in urine, who has lice, whose clothing is ready for the garbage, who is absolutely filthy, who has no water and has impetigo, whose head is misshapen from never being picked up or suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome, who is homeless again, who has a black eye from bring punched, your words, your prayers, your diapers and formula and layettes mean nothing. I am tired of the anecdotes. Step up to the really hard and heart breaking stuff and maybe we’ll talk.
22
Forget about Ireland, we have women in the US who will not be able to get abortions and a University OB/GYN department that will have to go out of state and create a clinic to train doctors to stay accredited.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-04/urgent-iowa-governor-...
26
This is a huge problem in our country too. Abortion is legal but some states have mandated illegal restrictions which disproportionately affect poorer women. Some states have few clinics, there are illegal waiting times, and there are states which force doctors to give out false information about abortions. The worst came last week where our president wants to restrict access even more by cutting off money to clinics that even mention the word abortion. Of course, none of this affects Ivanka or Tiffany if even wanted an abortion.
We allegedly live in a country with separation of church and state yet it is being run with the approval of evangelicals and their backward ways of thinking that every woman should be barefoot and pregnant. I hope the Irish overturn their oppressive rules of the Vatican but I also wish we would get out from under the thumb of the religious right which is already in our constitution.
23
Until men learn to keep their pants on, they should keep quiet about a woman's choice.
25
Like so many things, this issue too is part of the war against the poor, the wealthy, or the connected can always terminate an unwanted pregnancy even if they have to travel somewhere else.
I've heard it said that for girls for whom Catholic indoctrination didn't take say that if the pope, and priests, could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
15
This is an excellent column Ms. Down and one of the best ways to reinvigorate the whole concept of 'Womens' Rights'. Perhaps some will see into the mirror of what remains at stake for American women and in many more cases of 'Mens Rights' as well. This is for both sexes to begin contemplating: When does becoming a parent mandatory?
Whether, in the still catching up to 21st century, Ireland's social mores remain a question of forced coersion by criminalizing those who don't want to be parents. Jail time? Really?! We cannot claim to have advanced much further away from this way of collective thinking. Our politicians have expressed these very same threats.
From trump, on down the line to dog catcher, right from the pulpits in our nation's Bible Belt we hear the language of legal punishment. Some of these threats are codified into legal sanctions which continues the 'mission creep' to exclude the family physician from even mentioning the word "abortion" and any other language such as termination. The penalties suggested are even coming from our Congress.
7
My Catholic grandmother (Italian-American, not Irish) was pregnant twelve times but had only six children. She had wanted to stop after my father, her second born. She was berated by the Church for not being a "good Catholic woman". Not only did she suffer physical distress from the miscarriages, but she suffered bouts of depression as well. My father, sickened by all of the Church's hypocrisy, left the institution at age twenty. He also refused to have my sister and me raised Catholic primarily because he finds the Church's view of women as baby-making machines to be especially repugnant.
Unfortunately, this view is not limited to the Church; Republicans share it. And if we don't vote to stop them, we're headed straight for Gilead.
23
Obvious Rome has lost their influence. The Catholics had a firm grip on Ireland for a very very long time.
5
Ah - this is sad and shameful. One of my grandmothers was Irish Catholic. I wouldn't be here had it not been for the Jewish side and my compassionate father, because my mother would have died to save a fetus. As it was her life hung in the balance as she labored and labored for a day, a night and another day and eventually developed eclampsia. The hospital would have let her die to save the fetus which died anyway, but they wanted to baptize it. Thank goodness my father and the doctor intervened.
21
I often wonder how many of these Pro-Life people have ever gone out to adopt a child? Choice is an personal decission for a Woman to make. I'm a Pro choice Man.
18
Yes, the problem was theocracy when the founders of the US derived the legitimacy of government by delegation of specific natural powers of the people rather than a charter from God.
We can nuke away theocracy in the US by enforcing "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" on Congress.
9
Ireland is a Catholic country. And in an extremely perverse way, wrong as it is, the Irish justify their murderous ways on their women behind robes of cruel theology. But what is the excuse for our so called enlightened country regressing into the same mindset as the Irish? It's definitely not Catholic theology. The only theology seems to be suppressing women, taking away their rights as a person, their rights to their own bodies, their rights to decide for themselves, their rights to carve their own futures. Amazing that a country at the forefront of every scientific breakthroughs cannot discern between cells and a whole person denying women safe medical intervention to prevent sometimes life and death situations.
9
I am not one who doubts the moral sincerity of those who are against abortion. Nor do I see all pro-lifers as misogynists. The problem is, their moral stance lets them off very easily. It lets block out all thought about the details that surround tragic pregnancies--pregnancies resulting from rape, or involving severely deformed fetuses, or life-threatening situations for the mother, or pregnant 10-year-olds--and see those pregnancies in a fantasy world where there are always happy outcomes if the fetuses are brought to term.
It's this fact--that pro-lifers do not acknowledge that giving birth can lead to tragedy--that I can't forgive them for.
7
Abortion is of course a complicated subject. I believe the woman should try her best to prevent an abortion, no matter what the circumstance (unless her life is seriously threatened). The immediate situation, for 9 months, will be painful, but in the long term, she will feel tremendous joy for having carried out the pregnancy, possibly giving up the baby for adoption, or going through a change of heart and keeping what she now sees as a beautiful radiant child. The other option, terminating the pregnancy, will be less painful in the short term, but will haunt her for the rest of her life, having killed a potential life within her.
It's not easy. But we must not be hypocrites when we are quick to support abortions. Take the DACA kids. They were brought here without choice by their parents. We fight for their right to citizenship, because they are innocent of any crime. Is the baby in the womb any different?
3
My experience is that most women, whatever their feelings before or during pregnancy, evolve to feeling that their children are precious, and that life without them would be greatly diminished. This seems especially true of women who bear children born with special needs. It seems obvious to me that Irish and other societies have historically been too rigid. But forgive me for saying that elucidating the ugliest examples, many but not all of them accurate, to justify the position that all standards should be abolished, or that those sensitive to the sanctity of life, including Ms. Steen, have no basis for their opinions, is itself revolting. Human life is sacred, and protection of the unborn is, in almost all cases, noble. The warning about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater seems especially apt. Abortions should be legal but rare, not so much because of laws, but because of human decency. More importantly, adoption rules should be simplified, and proper care for women and their children, born and unborn, should be a most critical societal imperative. Prenatal care should be the best that can be offered, and women should be guaranteed, as they are in many countries, the means to properly care for themselves and their young. Ms. Dowd is a stylish writer, even when smug. She was allowed life and nurtured, and I'd like to think that the world has been enriched by her presence.
4
This issue not only rocks Ireland, but the U.S. as well. This Catholic has finally settled on a position. While he abhors abortion and considers everyone a failure, he also does not have the right to control other women. I would favor a national restriction except in the case of rape, incest or the mother's health. Others disagree.
In the end, the old "let you conscience by your guide" should come into play.
2
The country may be predominately Roman Catholic but there is nothing Christian in the way the women and children in this article were treated. Quite the opposite as it was judgmental and cruel to the extreme.
Yet another example of patriarchy and theocracy controlling women. And its 2018 and this is still going on!
10
I believe in unfettered access to affordable or, if necessary, subsidized abortion services up to the point of viability, at which point the state has a compelling legal interest in the matter.
But I also believe in honest discourse. Beyond the embryonic stage, you are killing a developing human being. Sometimes what is necessary is also ugly to contemplate. Abortion is an evil that prevents a greater evil. Life is not neat and it is often very far from beautiful. The right of a woman to decide whether to bear a child--entirely separate from the circumstances of its conception--should be absolute until the point of viability.
When those who fight for abortion rights can say the foregoing clearly and out loud--that one evil prevents a greater one--rather than denying the existence of any moral issue at all--they will begin to render the arguments of the other side irrelevant.
73
Bravo, SCA. "When those who fight for abortion rights can say the foregoing clearly and out loud--that one evil prevents a greater one--rather than denying the existence of any moral issue at all..."
4
I’m an Irish woman now living in San Francisco. But I remember 1983 in Ireland, I was very young, but old enough to become pregnant. I remember the referendum of 1983 and the fiasco it was back then.
I remember the politicians of both main parties telling the women of Ireland how to vote. I remember the Church telling me how bad I was if I voted Yes. And the consequences if I voted Yes. I remember the awful, horrendously graphic posters funded by the Christian Right from America. I remember the fear of going into a Family Planning clinic for contraception pills and hoping no one knew me or my parents would know by the time I got home! I remember the hate of the No side. I remember... I could go on, but my point is I’m solidly behind the women of Ireland on Friday. Go forth ladies vote, vote for your rights, vote like strong, stubborn, brave Irish women. Vote with a vengeance. Vote away discrimination, vote, vote, vote. Vote YES!
I will be watching you from afar, wishing I could vote too!
161
Anybody got a documented example where legal restrictions on abortions reduced the number of abortions and did not cause a lot more grief?
11
Ms.Dowd begins to touch on a discussion we rarely have: when are men going to be held responsible when fathering these children? Kept or not. Our male politicians and clergy are blameless, of course. Only women lose on earth or in heaven, is that right? Well, that must change when the female majority stands up for themselves to VOTE those selfish, heartless men out of office.
12
We could make sure everyone gets sex education and birth control and abortion would be only for the health of the mother and those terrible cases mentioned in the article.
If religion is not strong enough to enable people to practice celibacy, it must not stand in the way of outcomes.
In other words, while religion's intents are noble it must recognize limitations in is channels by which it reaches its audience.
Dogma in channels must be recognized as a failed approach to get the religion's nobling effect on mankind out.
A far superior approach is to give individuals the choice. For only after they have exercised the choice can their faith become stronger.
Not to say that please stop punishing helpless women.
6
I don't understand why people fetishize fetuses. These are undeveloped creatures, devoid of consciousness. I am sure many of these same people eat meat, approve of lab research on apes, support capital punishment and war. Jesus taught that we should love sinners and should encourage them to repent, that we should be peacemakers, generous to the poor, and to not boast about faith. The Christian right needs to go back and read the New Testament.
9
It seems the pro-birth movement isn't limited to the United States. I remember the Dan Barry article with its graves full of little children. It's a corrupt, cynical, and cruel system that forces mothers to give birth, then creates conditions under which those babies and children die.
Behind it all, it's a struggle for power over women's bodies. Why should anyone want that kind of control over another human being? Isn't that slavery?
10
I didn't read the article, I already know what it is about, taking away a woman's God given free will. As a cradle Catholic, I'm aware of all the talking points from the so-called-pro-life group and they are wrong!
I won't waste my time arguing this point, I believe it is the woman's right to choose, period! Those who want to take away a woman's freedom to choose, are the same people who vote for the heartless Republicans who won't fund schools, who won't feed the poor, who want only to enrich themselves and continue the endless wars!
8
With all the lamentations, none is more shaking than the silent cry of another abortion. Maria Steen is right: "Don't kill unborn children." Let be there to help mothers-to-be become the mother there were meant to be, no matter how the pregnancy happened. New human life has happened. Each one in the womb deserves a chance to life a life. Our mothers gave us ours. Which is the greater tragedy, becoming pregnant or aborting an innocent child-to-be?
1
False dichotomy: what is worse is being pro-birth but NOT providing a decent life for the resulting child. Do you support providing adequate child care? Education? Support single mothers?
Or do you just call yourself prolife and think that is doing your Christian duty?
14
I take it you're unaware that the "evidence," in that gawdawful "Silent Scream," flick was faked.
9
What evidence do you have that the"resulting child" does not have a decent life? Many of the birth mothers, adoptive parents as well as single women adopt many of the children whose mothers were courageous enough to give them life despite the hardships which their pregnancies involved .
Ms. Dowd 's stress on this being a woman's issue is purely political as is the current situation in Ireland. Children don't vote so it is not politically profitable for her to cite the welfare of the unborn child and focus instead on the women's rights issue. The Irish Constitution is indeed flawed due to the power which Mr. de Valera (an American, by the way), accorded to the RC Church in the administration of Ireland's government. Much of the backlash in Ireland today against the Eighth Amendment of its Constitution is the result of the sexual abuse scandal and the mother/baby homes and rightly so.
However, the unborn child should never be the victim as a result of a misguided government policy or a clerical culture which permitted clerical sexual abuse to occur.
This is all very simple, it really is. It's the woman's choice.
12
George Soros, the billionaire and Democrat, has been known to give to progressive causes. It has been reported that he has given a lot of money to further the cause of abortion in Ireland. He has promoted abortion in America and now he is targeting Ireland. Hopefully his money will not have an effect on the abortion side and people will ignore his promoting abortion on demand. The Irish will decide for themselves without the money of George Soros and hopefully his money will not buy the vote. The Irish people are too smart for George Soros and will not be fooled into voting for abortion. They will keep Ireland abortion free.
2
You left out Saul Alinsky, Vladimir Lenin, and the Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu.
Seriously, though, don't you folks ever wonder just why it is that you can't just make an honest argument and let it go at that?
Myself, I think it's because you don't want to come out and say what you clearly mean: you want everybody ruled by your religion.
14
if men we’re forced to have babies involuntarily, this would not be an issue. Wake up, women. We all know it’s true.
By the way, no one wants an abortion, it’s a super traumatic last resort.
8
It is not traumatic to everyone. An early term, routine abortion does not necessarily implicate much emotion beyond relief in a women who finds herself pregnant at a time that will wreak havoc in her life.
10
It seems that the same percentage that voted against the gay marriage referendum in Ireland -- 38% -- are about vote against a woman's right to choose to have an abortion:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/irish-times-poll-clear-sh...
What is being measured is the theocratic hold on the country. It is good that it is not dominant any more. It would be better if it were nonexistent.
That theocratic hold is not just the Catholic Church as an institution lecturing at every turn like a sanctimonious and hypocritical ignoramus. More important is that it reflects a personal choice for darkness made by those who are spiritually feeble, those who want to inflict their fear and bigotry on the rest of the country.
6
Few anti-abortion fanatics are credible because (paradoxically) they also oppose sex education and contraception.
Something is amiss which they fail to explain.
10
The tragedy of all abortion laws is that ultimately it affects only poor women. The human beings who can least afford a baby are forced to have one.
Religions are created by men who then get to write the rules. The rules are written to keep women as property or second class citizens. It serves only one purpose which is to maintain patriarchy.
9
Since the very first priest claimed to speak for some god, the paramount objective of all religions has been to subjugate women to defective men - mostly for sexual exploitation, but also as slave labor.
Roman Catholicism is no different. Nor is Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Orthodox Judaism, Shintoism, evangelical Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam. ("Incels" are expressions of the failure of secular societies to gratify their sexual demands of inadequate men.)
Some women find comfort in subjecting themselves to male masters, however -
Healthy women prefer to make their own choices, and
Healthy men prefer to defer to a woman's superior knowledge of herself.
Religion is for losers and abusers.
11
A Supreme Court retiree or two and women may be traveling to Ireland for abortions.
10
Michael,
I hope you are correct about the Supreme Court but those who want to end a baby's life will not be able to obtain one in Ireland. The Irish voters will cast a majority of no votes on abortion so Ireland will still be off limits.
OK, Christians, if you're going to call yourself pro lifers, and insist that you respect all life, here's what you have to do.
Churches should either pay taxes on their property and profits, or all churches should be converted to homeless shelters.
Churches should offer free birth control to all.
Christians should demonstrate outside the Pentagon and NRA headquarters the same way they demonstrate against abortion clinics. Christians should not own guns, and should condemn all wars.
Christians should condemn poverty, racism, sexism and all forms of violence, and join the effort to end them.
Go vegan, if you respect life. Ditch the plastic bag. Stop wearing fur, leather, wool and silk. Adopt a shelter pet.
Until you do all that, don't preach pro life at me.
25
There is no invisible man watching over the Irish people, just as there is none looking out for Israel or Saudi Arabia. It's just us here. We need to hold our governments accountable to the very real people that exist, and to make sure that laws account the overall welfare of society, and in cases of pregnancies, the mother of the unborn child.
5
How come most of the abortion providers here are MALE physicians???Shouldnt women be helping their sisters?Just a thought.
1
The same people who are battling against choice in Ireland are battling to end choice in the United States: conservative Roman Catholics and evangelical "Christians." In both countries, religion has turned even more radical as women -- not perhaps the majority, but increasing numbers of them worldwide -- have grown not just tired, but also fed up with any dogma, religious or otherwise, that relegates them to a subservient, obedient, servile and potentially dangerous existence.
6
Physics leaves no doubt that projecting a human personality onto nature is a delusion. Why do we allow delusionals to govern us?
6
"She was a virginal abbess who conjured a comely maiden for her disappointed suitor to marry."
If that's not the definition of entrenched patriarchy I don't know what is. And that, right there, is the problem.
9
Thank you Maureen for this excellent column!
3
I don't need the Bible to tell me thou shalt not steal or thou shalt not kill.
The Bible has slavery.
The Bible has polygamy.
The Bible says we should stone a woman to death for adultery.
Funny they don't stone a man to death for adultery.
Not only was the Bible written by man, it was written by men.
15
“Ireland hates women”. Especially educated, uppity women. And “difficult teenagers” and unmarried young pregnant women. Remember how Ireland, with the help of their Catholic Church, until fairly recently imprisoned those women as unpaid workers in laundries, and stole their babies and sold them to rich people, many of them Americans.
Because of misogyny, Ireland has always been the poorest, most backward country in Western Europe.
7
Yes, Maureen. To think an unborn child has an inherent right to sacred life. Silly, antiquated idea.
1
To think that only a fetus has a right to a sacred life.
10
My body is not your business! Women get out and vote!
12
The face of cruelty:
“Two of the most harrowing “hard cases” were the 1992 “X case,” when a 14-year-old girl who was raped by the father of a friend and became suicidal was barred from leaving the country to get an abortion, and the 2012 case of Savita Halappanavar, first reported by Kitty Holland in The Irish Times.”
10
Love the Emerald Isle. Hate abortion. Having said that, I still believe in a woman's right to choose.
6
How many women who are against abortion would actually die for their unborn fetus?
9
How many men who are against abortion would actually die for the unborn fetus they helped to create?
8
Well Ms. Dowd, have you had any "interesting" conversations at the company water cooler lately with your colleague at the Times, Mr. Douthat, who in his patented style of dense circumlocution posits in a counter column that the 8th Amendment is acceptable law as an element of the lauded Irish "model"? If you have, or do, please clue your readership in on the expected fireworks. "Hell hath no fury...".
1
You either let the women decide what they want to do with their bodies or you don't. i don't understand all these hand wringing or debate. We way passed the debate. It's either women's subjectivities or the religious doctrine.
7
Among the other things this excellent article makes clear in passing: make no mistake, these people are after contraception too.
If they get what they want in this country, you may rest assured that it'll be on to all the Plan B pills, then the Pill, then whatever. The last stage'll be condoms.
It's a far-right Christianity we're dealing with, not science and not reason: the point, finally, is to jam women back in the box.
35
It’s a far right Christianity that is captive of far right wealthy.
The rich want the ever greater concentration of wealth and power on their behalf and at the expense of others. In a quasi-democratic situation, they lack the votes and so must go fishing for voters who will vote against their interest.
Enter abortion politics. Catholics especially but Christians by extension should vote social democratic, according to catholic social teaching. With the issue the baby, ironically, is thrown out with the bathwater.
Morality is a middle class characteristic, the rich don’t need it and the poor can’t afford it, so the moral position is to vote social democratic to expand the middle class in both directions.
The rich have endowed their family foundations, which in turn have endowed various religious organizations, with the implication that they nudge their members to the right politically, and they use the issue of abortion to do so. This has gained the most traction with fundamentalist who had always been the poor step child, in wealth and political power, of religions in American society - behind mainline Protestants and Catholicism. This envy for wealth, power, and influence is one reason why they stick with Trump (Trump delivered the numbers & then delivered the tax cuts so the rich right are okay with this arrangement).
17
“Poverty is a form of violence, the worst kind”-Gandhi
“If you want peace, work for justice”-Paul VI
“Values, morality, ethics, what have you, r middle class characteristics, the rich don’t need ‘em and the poor can’t afford them”
So if you want a more moral society then vote for policies that expand the middle class-in both directions.
Catholic social policy practically dictates that all Catholics (& by extension all Christians) be social democrats & vote accordingly.
There is one loop hole: abortion.
Because of that loop hole the majority of Catholics (I know) vote for Fascist policies: the ever greater concentration of wealth & power for the sake of the wealthy & powerful at the expense of the weak & poor.
This in turns creates more extremes of wealth & poverty & a vastly more immoral society.
Abortion is where violence is visited upon the poor & weak.
Prohibition of abortion is hardly different from prohibition of drink: The law attempts to eliminate a vice by prohibiting it’s supply. Eliminate the supply & the problem will go away right?
Supply side solutions r the GOPs answer to everything & it never really works, just makes society more dystopic. We know 2/3rds of economics is driven by demand & so managing anything should come from managing demand.
Compromise: If they’r going to impose penalties have them visited on the impregnator. Make the would be father serve 14 years for the would be mother having an abortion or taking pills.
Seems only fair/just
19
It isn’t the would be fathers that should be punished. It is the impregnators who try to avoid their parental responsibilities.
Maureen, thanks for this calm and reasonable reflection on what you so correctly characterize as a turbulent debate of deep importance.
But a few suggestions, with all due respect.
The abortion debate wasn't "hidden" in Ireland so much as suppressed. The difference being that anyone who went against convention--in word, never mind in deed--was vilified actively and without mercy by the powers that be, and by that part of the citizenry that agreed with them. I offer this observation as someone who grew up in Ireland.
My mother, a devout Catholic born in Ireland and still living there now, told me the most eye-opening experience of her nursing internship in the 1950s was the number of cases that came in with self-attempted abortions, gin and bathtub, coat hanger, etc. There were, and are, far more brutal paths gone down than any you describe in this article, when it comes to the measures desperate young women have taken to terminate their pregnancies when denied any legal avenue to do so.
Yes, there are people of good will on both sides of this argument, but the fact is that in Ireland (like anywhere else) real decisions must be made when it comes to situations where ideal paths are no longer an option--so the question is who gets to make those decisions. There's nothing easy about this for anyone involved, but at the end of the day--as a man--I think the woman gets the final word on this issue, given that the brunt of what happens in pregnancy falls to her lot.
32
If they want to assign criminal liability on someone for an abortion, why not hang it on the male, the impregnator.
If a women has an abortion, or takes pills, and you want it to be a crime, have him convicted for a crime, and have him pay the penalty.
I would assume there would be a lot more discression before the fact, but in truth, the poor would once again be the majority of victims.
7
Just exactly who decided they have a right to try to tell one-half the world's population - women - what they can do with their own bodies and lives?
A bunch of supposed celibate but in actuality predatory pedophile priests who will never add a thing to the furtherance of humanity so they try to tell the rest of us what we can and can't do?
What a "fairy" tale. It is centuries past time to put it and the catholic church into the dustbin of HIStory.
Women were endowed by their creator - the universe - with the inalienable right to decide what to do with their own bodies and lives. Women around the world MUST stop allowing a fairy tale to decide their fate. It's simply ludicrous and not too bright.
34
A powerful essay, Maureen. It is indeed 2018, and yet this artificial stigma prevails under a powerful religion that supports it.
There are nations that are associated with religions, as we all know. The issue is education. If nations support education, then they'll run into tests to their irrational laws.
Yes, I know that there is a clever Jesuit out there who could make the argument to criminalize reproductive rights, but I'll simply point *him* to that billboard that is hardly a rational statement.
It's simple for me in both ways. If a culture deny reproductive rights, then, meh, I'm a man, so what do I care? But, if a culture is to support reproductive rights, it realizes that the choice belongs entirely to the woman, who is free to consult family, friends, psychologists, doctors, and, even clergy, for advice. I vote for reproductive rights.
It isn't abortion that's the stigma, it's the religion that is the stigma when women are forced to die for its cause.
11
The vast majority of abortions involve two people. While some men want the pregnancy, many do not. Many if not most are aware of the abortion. And many support the women by helping to pay, by going with her for the procedure, and so on. But we hear nothing about punishment for these partners in abortion. Nothing about capital punishment by hanging for these men, as was recently proposed for women by one of this paper's former writers. The thought of joint punishment for a joint act is never even thought of, much less discussed. Please, if you're reading this and are anti-abortion, can you tell us why not?
19
The threats of capital punishment and hanging are obvious rhetorical devices used by extremists.
Do you want to discourage men from being involved at all?
1
As a young girl growing up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Boston in the era of Roe v. Wade, one of my most formative memories is that of my best friends mother, a devoutly Catholic woman explaining to us what conditions had been like in before abortion became legal. Friends of hers had terminated their pregnancies in a variety of horrific ways, at least one of which ended in a fatality. By denying women safe, legal abortions, "pro-life" advocates are not stopping abortions, they are forcing it underground.
34
I am an Irish Catholic woman who also grew up in Boston before Roe v Wade became the law of the land. I am not aware of any abortions occurring before this time. I am not saying that they did not occur I am just noting that I did not know of any thank goodness.
Boston is one of the most pro life cities in the country today. I know because I give to the right to life organization in this city. I am not able to attend many meetings but am interested in what is happening on the pro life front in Boston and follow their goings on through their magazine. You have reminded me to send in my renewal registration. Thank you for this.
Those in the Boston movement are tireless in their pro life efforts and have made a difference in saving the lives of many innocent fetuses/ babies. They are relentless and consider life a beautiful thing and cherish it greatly. I wholeheartedly agree.
1
While I disagree with you on the issue, I respect the sincerity of your words.
However, when you say in reply to the original commenter that you are "not aware" of any such cases, I'd ask you to consider whether she hasn't just made you aware.
By all means, do your own research and don't simply take anyone else's word for it. But my own mother, a devout Irish Catholic, told me of her own shock as a nursing intern back in the 1950s upon seeing quite a number of such cases. So I do find the original commenter here credible.
2
Beyond noting that you're talking about Catholicism, not Boston; that Boston was also the nest of Louise Day Hicks and one wonders if there's a connection; that "goings on," and "relentless," were excellent word choices...
I for one really get tired of these smug claims that the people standing outside clinics alternately droning and screaming at women and kids are the only folks who care about life.
The old adage about never discussing religion and politics made sense in social settings.
On a societal and cultural level it is never a good thing to mix religion and politics. It is even worse when religion is the basis for public policy.
19
Abortion is no man's business.
27
"Right to life" and "pro-life" are logically (not just politically) absurd..
1. Rights (e.g. rights to vote) are protected options--others have duties not to interfere with doing or omitting.
Options only make sense given the capacity to choose--which fetuses, plants and many animals lack.
It really means "duty not kill".
2. "Life" is either "biology-life" (anything with cells or "biography-life" (life story). Quality of life, thus, is (a) health, or (b) health and welfare.. Pro lifers care nothing about welfare--often making child and parents miserable.
3. "Don't kill"--without qualification--applies all life forms--and is thus absurd. "Don't murder" means "Don't wrongfully kill, with mens rea etc." It is usually limited to persons.
4. Persons are beings with personalities--human or ETs.; beings with beliefs, feelings, appetites, ambitions and aspirations. Fetuses and infants are potential persons.
5. But fetuses--unlike infants--are totally dependent on one person's body--a form of symbiosis--like parasites, except hosts may or may not be willing. Neonates are really external embryos--dependent--but not on one person's body. (Humans are like marsupials--but needing prosthetic pouches.)
6. Civilized communities have default duties to care for infants--duties are assigned to individuals--as jobs.
7. But if such duties are assigned without consent to pregnant women --they become the community's reproductive slaves--forced laborers--unfree re "life" both senses.
11
But can it move past its medieval abortion law? Don't bother. Children should not be killed because of unprotected sex!
3
Ah yes, because nobody gets pregnant despite using contraception!
1
On the other hand, we could teach everyone sex education and make sure all have birth control.
That would eliminate almost all abortions.
You can help Planned Parenthood accomplish this.
Fix the problem instead of just fighting.
4
Biology Lesson #1 - Children (babies) aren't killed (by abortion) because of unprotected sex. If you've got evidence to the contrary, please let the proper authorities know.
This is such an explosive issue. It’s what made Right-wing Christians turn a blind eye to Trump’s sexual exploits knowing he is now anti abortion. People vote on one major issue regardless of the eligibility and character of the candidate.
A women’s choice is not always an easy one. To see these politicians fight for the lives of the unborn, but when 7 year olds attending school were killed, they say it’s too soon to visit gun regulations. The health and well-being of babies outside the womb are less of a concern. Those living in poverty are less of a concern. Those with expensive medical conditions are less of a concern. Those who are killed while in class are never a concern. But let’s defund schools, clinics and everything else that will enhance the lives of our children outside the womb.
63
And it was all supposed to be precluded by denying Congress the power to treat any religious belief as a fact meritorious of recognition by law.
1
Ireland debates whether abortion should be legal, and parts of the United States are in the process of making it illegal. Some of these elected officials (men) are truly clueless, but most are just pandering for votes. There is nothing truer than this: if men had babies, abortion would be as readily available as Viagra.
51
If men got pregnant abortion would be a sacrament.
3
Only on the left is a law that bans the mass murder of unborn children a medieval law. Seriously, what’s the difference between abortion and a post-birth abortion (aka murder)? I cannot think of one difference, except that unborn children cannot in any way prevent their murder
4
Here you go:
Stephen Landers (Times pick here):
"There was an excellent long-form article in The Times about Tuam. In addition to the 796 wee bodies buried in a septic tank, the surviving children were abused physically and emotionally by the nuns. They were referred to as "the spawn of Satan." To inflict that kind of torment on innocent children is appalling, and yet the same religious bigots insist that women deliver unwanted pregnancies. If we are going to throw around pejoratives, they should be reserved for those nuns that participated in this atrocity.
"The same is true in the U.S. The religious right can bleat about every life being sacred, but reduce SNAP assistance to the poor, and make medical care all but impossible for so many people. Once the baby is born, their concern abruptly ends. I see the anti-abortion movement as a path to moral superiority on the cheap."
28
There is an enormous difference between a fetus in the early stages of development and a neonate ( infant). A fetus with undeveloped physiological systems should not have precedence over a woman's right to life and health. It is an either/or situation; and a woman has rights. Pregnancy does not erase those rights. I love children and babies, but the women that those children and babies grow into have all the dignity and worth of full humanity. Reducing them to mandatory incubators is a crime against their humanity. By all means, encourage women to continue their pregnancies. Offer them care, assistance, support! But the decision must come from the woman, not the state.
15
Very big difference.
1
How a bright Iirsh lass like you can conclude abortion is a right is beyond the pale of commonsense and the common good. To eliminate the burden of a 9 month pregrancy, you support mothers destroying the entire life of their human fetus. Prochoicers choke on the word "baby", but that's exactly what that fetus is. How sad we can't find folks who, like Brigid, are there to help women through their pregnancies. Instead, you lament the cost of abortion elsewhere. The real cost is borne by the unborn. Think more and deeper when you cross yourself at that gurgling well.
2
You didn't bother to read past the religious allegory, did you. Please try again.
36
If you had to choose be your life or the unborn fetus you were carrying, which would you choose?
4
Read my earlier note for the allegory issues, Susan. Ms. Dowd has them muddled. There's no evidence Brigid did anything more than help a pregnant woman, who may have had a miscarriage. It's a leap to think she was an abortionist, as her other actions are clearly prolife.
Some politicians - with no knowledge of reproduction beyond what is of interest to themselves - want to make a fertilized egg a person and declare any loss of that egg murder. Nature doesn't let every fertilized egg survive, so any woman whose egg fails to implant effectively will be murderers. Even if they have no way of knowing that it occurred. We will need womb police to examine us after every act of coitus until menopause. Like the ad said, Expensive, but worth it. Think of it as a growth industry.
16
I'm Irish. Perhaps I see this issue too simplistically. If your family can afford to feed another child, take one in, Feed them,love them, care for them. Spend your time doing this. But don't spend your time forcing a woman who cannot have a child to have one. Ruthann O'Donnell Miller
41
I'll calmly say: terminating an unwanted pregnancy is good for the mother and a merciful, humanitarian gesture to the living cells inside her which are not yet a viable human.
Because an unwanted human is too often disadvantaged and from birth. A birth, a new child should be welcomed with love, not be unwanted.
That's a horrible fate.
Now, why would anyone want that for an innocent newborn? That's cruel.
Only those who FREELY CHOOSE and sincerely want to create and birth AND FULLY LOVE a new life should be encouraged to so.
All others should be encouraged to wait till they can accept, honor and love that life. Should be lovingly encouraged to wait and try again.
Certainly, a case of pregnancy due to sexual assault should be ended if that is the mother's desire! Come on now!!
Desired, wanted, fully accepted and LOVED!
That is closest to God's plan and desire for an innocent newborn.
That's God's way.
Anyone want to dispute that?
32
For those of us who don't believe in God: Girls and women are not baby machines, no one has the right to tell any woman whether or when to have a child, and every child should be wanted and born to people who are able to nurture and support it. Civilized countries support children and their parents by ensuring all have comprehensive health care and social support, and women do not have to choose between their careers and caring for young children.
In the US, we are still fighting over whether women have as many civil rights as men: we still have no Equal Rights Amendment. Our society offers no social support to families and parents struggle to find and pay for decent childcare and healthcare. When people have to spend a tremendous amount of time and energy defending their rights and acquiring basic necessities they are not able to improve their standard of living, which allows the ownership class to stay in power.
19
Add to your comment....
”.... and supported with shelter, sustenance, health care, and financially.... for a minimum of 18 years....” and then I would agree, but partially. The mother deserves care in all those areas for herself as well.
2
Unless all these prospective baby-killers who look for an abortion have conceived through immaculate conceptions, behind everyone one of these women there is a man. Where are the men? Why are they not held responsible? If everyone of the 3000+ men who impregnates in love or hatred, in indifference or in mistake, were to be required to support for twenty-on years any child that is born from the encounter, my bet is that the anti-abortion screech would turn to a whisper (not a whimper).
38
Thank you!
This heartfelt plea and collection of stories about real people should pierce the hearts of those who think unborn babies are the only part of life worth preserving. Perhaps I should add that abortion opponents are all too often in favor of privilege, power, and wealth, and eager to criminalize and handicap the less fortunate. And they don't care about human health. The unborn babies and their mothers/families are welcome to cope on their own as care is taken away.
18
For nearly 2000 years, the church taught that life begins at "quickening" when the baby first draws a breath -- literally, inspiration with the Holy Spirit. It was then that the soul entered the body.
Before that, there was no reason for god or the government to get involved.
Now, with the advances of science, conservatives have recently discovered righteous new moral values to impose on other people, values that did not exist for most of history, and which threaten the life and well-being of the mother.
It's not only "unborn children" who have no soul.
25
The quickening is actually when the pregnant woman begins to feel the fetus moving within her womb.
It's kind of like fishing vs. hunting. I can fish because fish have never drawn a breath and thus cannot have been inspired by the Holy Spirit. I have trouble killing anything that breathes, however, including human beings.
Good grief, lass....you need to get your Journalism 101 reviewed. How in the name of Brigid did you conclude that her miraculous treatment of a pregnant woman in need resulted in her doing an abortion? Not having been there ourselves, it's equally tentative to say there may have been miscarriage. Who knows? Certainly, not the likes of us who weren't able to assist. How can any thoughtful person conclude that abortion (read killing our own kind) is a viable option for a non-viable procedure. The human fetus is destroyed. The message of saintly Brigid is for us to be there to help pregnant mothers who need help before, during and after their pregnancy. The Scarlet Letter in the Green Isle is "A" for abortion. With help from the many, there's no need for abortion.
2
Clearly you don't care about the babies once they're born. The religious story is an allegory, not fact. But your hatred of real facts seems to have stopped there. Please read the rest, and ask yourself if perhaps health care for the whole family should be part of the equation of caring for wanted babies, rather than forced birth and no health care.
23
"Not having been there ourselves, it's equally tentative to say there may have been miscarriage."
Which, of course, means that God performed the abortion.
2
The technical term for miscarriage is "spontaneous abortion". If St. Brigid caused a spontaneous abortion to occur, is it still spontaneous? Or is it just an abortion?
2
Seriously, it's time to revitalize those laundries. These pesky women have just taken too much for granted and the forbearance of men simply will not last forever.
Now, can I get those shirts starched...?
14
Abortion is (and should be) a matter of choice between a woman and her healthcare provider.
I can think of a dozen or more medical reasons for late-term abortion - heart attack, kidney failure, eclampsia, pregnancy-induced diabetes, etc... and a dozen more if the woman is a hemophiliac. But pro-choice theocrats would kill the woman.
As for "life" beginning at conception, it's a zygote with less "life" attributes than an amoeba, so proscribing abortion is just senseless. Unless you're talking about the "soul" which is a religious word for mind, not yet formed in a zygote. "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion".
23
My 94 year old aunt told me she knew young women whos sugar daddies would send them to Cuba for abortions. Change takes time.
11
The caption under the photo of Maria Steen was changed to "don't kill unborn children" which is what she actually said from "don't kill any more children" which was printed in error. I think the second sentiment which was not spoken is also appropriate in the pro life/abortion debate. Too many children have been lost to abortion around the world and we do not need to see any more die. If Ireland does allow abortions to be performed legally in their country, many more children will see their lives ended in this cruel and evil act.
I hope the people of Ireland vote no and let the babies be brought into the world. If they vote yes, it will be one of the saddest days in Ireland's history. We will start to see an increase in abortions and that is horrendous.
1
I've written this before and I will rewrite it again, women are more than 50% of the vote, if we vote accordingly this nonsense will never occur. We have only ourselves to blame and we allow ourselves to be branded with the scarlet letter. Even if you would not choose an abortion for yourselves, please vote for your sisters to have the choice.
Women, please vote for yourselves, your daughters and your granddaughters.
22
Exactly! If women voted in their best interests, this argument would end!
We must get the vote out in November.
2
In some future civilized era, should the Earth be resilient enough to maintain a hospitable environment, we will look at religion, particularly Catholicism as a mental disorder.
This patriarchal, mystical nonsense has entrapped and harmed women for centuries.
Observing otherwise reasonable humans defend religion gives testimony to the power of socialization and control.
14
Thank you Ms. Dowd, this was flavored by your own family’s experience. Right now in Oklahoma we are being inundated by tiresome political ads on behalf of “pro life conservative Republicans” who are either endorsed by Donnie Junior or who claim they will work with Trump to make the state great again. All professing to have had prior great success in their lives as businessmen or ex-secret service agents. Never mind that Republican governance here has been disastrous for 8 years. Never mind that the state’s finances haven’t been helped by repeated legislative grandstanding regarding abortion prohibitions and religious monuments. They pass these laws and the laws get repeatedly struck down. We don’t have political progress or evolution here, we have devolution.
25
"...unborn children..."
This is a contradiction in terms.
In my dreams I live in a world without religion, where investigative thought and scientific discovery are what excites people, and common sense is more valued than the preaching of old bedtimes stories to a bunch of simple minds.
Unfortunately, the species just isn't that smart. It may take a tragedy on the scale of Nazism to finally rid the world of religion. Priests and others who rail against abortion and then go on to sexually and psychologically abuse children are an expression of evil.
32
For most of my life I've been flummoxed by the oxymoron at the heart of the anti-abortion crusade: how can you kill someone who is neither born nor capable of independent life? The fact that close to half of fertilized eggs abort naturally--what we delicately call miscarriage--seems to confirm the self-evident fact that humanness, whatever that is, is not innate from the first moment of conception.
41
The outsourcing of the PAP smears to a Texas Lab, and the inevitable results, was bound to happen. When the lowest bidder is chosen, you absolutely get what you pay for. This is my field, Pathology. Some of these
" Labs " rely on unqualified, poor trained personnel, have very little quality control, if any, and pay well below the average for their workers. It's all about the profit, exponentially. After all, it's JUST Women. I would love to see an investigation and extensive coverage of this issue in the NYT. You can bet that many of your readers would be very interested, and possibly directly affected. Some states ( including a Texas ) have very scant regulation regarding Laboratories. Where does YOUR Pap Smear get sent for processing and Screening ??? Do you Know ??? You absolutely should. Beware.
24
Oh look, MD has found a younger sister, then devoted a whole column to an anti-abortion fanatic.
I can't figure out who is more right wing: MD or Ms. Noonan.
4
It's a shame that the women of Ireland are in such a position.
It's shameful that the women of America seem to be headed backwards to that same place.
27
Better to raise the the unwanted
unborn until 18 years of age and then recruit them into military service, as it is now unofficially practiced in “Merica.” That way the system gets a return on investment! “Tet” ‘68
6
when i see you quoting someone like niall o'dowd, it gives me real pause about the quality of your journalism elsewhere. are you quoting o'dowd duplicates in your other pieces that we don't know about?
3
I am surprised you did not tell the real story about the Lost Children of Tuam: There were 796 little corpses, mostly aged between a few weeks old and 2 years old. Their little bodies were not in an "unmarked grave" as you write.
The nuns of the Bon Secours threw the dead children down into the septic tank at the Magdalene Laundry in Tuam. They threw the little corpses of the children they neglected to death down the sewer.
That is not even to mention the number of babies that the Bon Secours sisters illegally trafficked from Tuam to childless American RC couples without the permission of the birth mothers.
So much for the Roman Catholic View of the Sanctity of Life.
I stand with my friends among Ireland's Witches, urging a YES vote on the 25th.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/28/world/europe/tuam-ireland...
24
You didn't mention the Muslim who was catholic, gay (as you usually stare) and was, i thing, engaged to an American. He considers a fetus, unlike catholic Scalia to be a person! As we know the Irish government stated the Catholics stashed millions, or billions of cash around the world from orphans. Don't forget the other dead babies! The Irish government closed 50 percent of parochial schools and a half time ambassador to the Vatican because the Vatican is not interested in kids. One of your reviewers stated i am anti catholic ... when you were called that ... I stated they were anti Jew anti Muslim anti Christian (Catholics are not Christian ... Jesus Mary and Joseph were buried years before Catholicism).
If the current successful anti abortion efforts continue here in the US, our daughter’s daughters will be living in a larger version of Ireland.
10
If men could become pregnant there would be storefront abortion clinics on half the streets in America.
25
Well said Maureen. thank you.
2
Why is there a photo of Maria Steen? What purpose does it serve?
2
Darts.
16
Lorenzo,
They chose the photo of Maria Steen to accompany this article because she is representative of the Irish pro life woman of today. She is elegant, beautiful and well educated who values the life of the unborn. She makes me proud of my Irish heritage and I only wish I could be there on Friday for this landmark decision. I do hope that the Irish vote no on this very important referendum. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the Irish do the right thing and reject abortion in their country.
1
What a disgrace, humiliating women when seeking an abortion for an unwanted pregnancy, as we men, heavy contributors to make a pregnancy possible, continue the hypocrisy of forbidding a choice that only women ought to make. This, in strict justice. Who are we to judge? Abortion should remain legal, affordable, safe and, hopefully, rare. Rare if there is a way to educate us all in taking precautions (beyond abstinence), and making 'the pill' widely available. It seems 'rich' that so many republicans, rigidly religious and out of sync with modernity, still oppose 'the very pill' that would prevent 'accidental' pregnancies to begin with...and avoid abortions altogether perhaps. Nobody wants to kill children, let's not be stupid. Let's get together instead, and try to resolve this ancient issue, in the most rational, and practical, way possible. And the Irish are but a sample of our contempt in finding a solution suitable with our times. Or does anybody think that women find pleasure in having abortions? Let's get real!
25
The Roman Catholic Church has been waging population war for global universal hegemony since its inception by the Nicene Council.
6
My first pregnancy was very much planned and wanted. At 10 weeks I began spotting and an ultrasound revealed a supposed embryo. Four days later a second ultrasound deemed it an incompletely expelled "blighted ovum" and I was rushed into surgery for an emergency D&C. Were I in Ireland and not Illinois, I would have been forced to let this blob of tissue, without the genetic wherewithal to have become a fetus (much less a baby), fester in my womb until I became septic and died.
Attention, "pro-life" religious conservatives: is THAT what you want to happen? Is THAT why you look the other way on Trump's corruption, treason, blatant infidelities and dishonoring of women--just so you can get Congress to prevent women (especially poor women and women of color) from having sex without consequences?
42
The will do whatever it takes to enable them to make arbitrary religious judgements of everyone through unconstitutional laws in the United States.
9
Coming soon to a Republican controlled Democracy (so far) near you.
11
They nuns and Catholic Church in Ireland sold babies to rich people in the US. A movie was made about it. It's called " Philomena".
One of the many evils emanating from the Catholic Church beside pederasy, theCrusades, the Inquisition , and the religious wars. Their opposition to birth control results in the need and the performance of abortions. A thoroughly evil institution.
20
Catholic Relief Services has saddled many hopeful adopters with very difficult babies resulting from troubled pregnancies with congenital issues and fetal alcohol exposure.
4
As has been said many times, if men could get pregnant, birth control would be free and abortions readily available.
14
A law holding hit and run daddies responsible for child support if DNA testing establishes their fatherhood would change a lot of tunes.
7
My Irish eyes are crying.
1
It would be too easy to point out your personal role in the changes we are now facing in the US. It would be too easy Maureen. Sleep on that tonight.
8
My mom, born in 1929, knew where the abortion "clinic" in Seattle was in the late 1940s. So did all of her friends. I never asked how she came to know its location and she never said. Enough with the make abortion illegal and there will be no abortions argument. Rather, there will be no safe abortions. It became the straw that broke her loyalty to the church and made her an ex-Catholic.
21
I am utterly gobsmacked by the degree of savagery and misogynistic sadism evidenced by the willingness of self-professed theists to compel an unwilling mother to bring an anencephalic fetus to term and trumpeting it as the "moral" choice.
The only "god" who might traffic in such wickedness might be if Satan, if he were indeed the god of this world. I'll have none of that truck!
23
My only comment on this issue is this: Don't give legitimacy to the idea that abortion is only ok when the pregnancy is caused by rape or incest. Every woman should have the choice. Those that even consider this "middle ground" are complete hypocrites. Either you believe abortion is murder or you don't. To say it is murder, but it's ok to murder the fetus of a rapist is completely inconsistent. Why (in your view) is it ok to kill a"person" because the father is a criminal? I don't agree with this side but let's not let them seem humane when they're simply hypocritical.
14
The software component of humanity should define the beginning of life. Loading up the experience needed to acculturate begins at birth.
2
Great piece by Maureen. Can hardly wait to read commentary and What the cub reporter for the Vatican Times, her buddy Ross, has to say.
2
Denying women control over their reproductive decisions is nothing more than racial bigotry based on gender rather than skin color or ethnic origin. It is disgusting and women should no longer put up with it, no matter which country they inhabit.
The hypocritical men in power who perpetuate such Injustice should be removed from power at the earliest possible moment.
16
There is no rational basis for giving any weight to a man's opinion on this matter, it should be decided by women with the assistance of medical professionals, and beyond the reach of anyone or anything else. The state has no legitimate interest other than ensuring the health and wellbeing of the woman making the decision. Any man who presumes to opine on the merits of "pro life" should be required to wear a pregnancy suit for 9 months prior to his input, one designed to inflict the various aches and pains and anxieties pregnancy induces in most women. As a father I take great pride in my small though significant contribution to the miracle that is my daughter. However, I do not entertain the conceit that I did much more than provider her mother with the means by which to work the miracle herself. Anyone who's witnessed the tribulations of pregnancy and childbirth and still considers women the weaker sex has, in my considered opinion, a serious case of cranial-sphincter occlusion.
13
"If men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament." Florence Kennedy
If equality means anything women must have the ability, and the right, to manage what happens with their own bodies. Comprehensive sex education is essential, but neglected in too many Southern states.
8
“This country is in the midst of an excruciating existential battle over whether it should keep its adamantine abortion statute, giving an unborn baby equal rights with the mother. ”
It is rare for Maureen to show she cares about an issue. Aside from hating Clinton’s. But this is absolutely positively not an “existential battle”.
It's too bad the evangelicals don't like Catholics. They could make common cause in Ireland.
1
I have been pro-choice since reading The Scarlet Letter in ninth grade.
8
Those who are anti-abortion live in a dream world. They think that every child born will be welcomed with love and will live in a secure world where there is no poverty. I suggest that anyone in Ireland who is anti-abortion read Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes". Perhaps that tale of a woman forced to have too many children without any real support from her husband and what it ultimately did to her. It is not a pretty tale. Abortion will never be eliminated legal or not. When it is illegal woman's lives are at risk and there is no happily ever after. And when did the Catholic church ever care very much about woman and their rights to live a free and meaningful life. Woman are so much more than baby incubators. I shall be watching Friday's vote.
13
One question- why is Ireland allowed to remain part of the EU (and UK?) with its Draconian and barbaric laws on abortion? The EU moralizes and chastizes its member states on just about every issue (think immigration and refugees, for one) but this.
1
The correct solution to the abortion issue is for women to practice abstinence until they are married. Unwanted 'love children' should be put up for adoption. A woman has no right to murder her children.
1
Please enlighten us as to “the correct solution” for men. You only mention women which certainly implies that only they play a role in pregnancy.
5
Women have abortion for many reasons. I had one, as a married woman due to fetal abnormalities. It was very hard for me but I was lucky to have to choice to do so. I made the decision with my husband and medical providers.
Promoting Abstinence only does not work. Young people need sex education and reliable, affordable birth control.
2
Ireland is about to change and allow women the right to abortion. This is a backlash against the Catholic church and its lies. The vote for Gay marriage showed this. Meanwhile in the US we are going backwards and allowing our hypocritical leader's eat away at a woman's right to choice!
8
Any self induced psychological trauma suffered by expectant mothers should be compared to the trauma suffered by a defenseless fetus being ripped from the womb and denied a chance at life.
2
Somehow I don't think it would have been a tragedy if Hitler had been aborted. Not every life is worth living.
To make matters worse, we are hypocrites when we spew "pro life" rhetoric at others. We are willing to kill millions of children in wars, let them starve to death, but we whine and cry if one fetus gets aborted. Don't preach pro life at me until the church is willing to use its ill-gotten gains to support all these unwanted babies, and to demonstrate against every war that kills children.
8
Maureen is painting a vivid portrait of a theocracy in all but name, a fate that will be visited on the United States in short order if Trump and Pence are not reined in before they are "reigned" in.
5
If anyone is against abortion, fine. Don't have one. And stay out of other people's business.
16
We're on a slippery slope folks, and here's our cautionary tale. Consider that the recent tax law changes allowed unborn children to be "covered" for education savings plans, thereby subtly establishing their "rights". The uber conservatives were very disappointed that their extreme efforts to include an unborn fetus as a child deduction failed. At least this time. Scary times indeed.
8
I know first hand the price paid by women who do not have access to abortion. In the days before Roe, my sister died in her bedroom when something went wrong with her secret pregnancy. She had not told anyone that she was pregnant and had not visited any doctors. I was 10 years old and saw her laboring on her bed, blood soaking the sheets, while my mother called the ambulance. My sister died at 19. If she had been able to go into her college health center, or Planned Parenthood and obtained an abortion, I have no doubt that she would be alive today. I don't care at all that the fetus would have died. I would still have my sister. Extremists have used their religion to justify the deaths of many women just like her. I have nothing but contempt for those who think they have the right to force their idiotic religious views on the rest of us. I will never stop fighting for women's access to abortion.
23
What an inhumane country. I refuse to ever travel to Ireland until they stop abusing women this way.
4
Iowa’s -female- governor just signed a bill that makes all abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy illegal and potentially subject to “capital punishment,” including the mother and the doctor. Let that sink in for a while, 2018 USA, while “Conservatives” of this great nation want to join Ireland to become the new El Salvador. Good luck to all the enlightened Irish on Friday. May they prevail over the Christian Sharia laws.
14
The old saying is still true: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”
6
Welcome to the NY Times echo chamber. Abortion is the taking of innocent human life. The argument that American conservatives (a far cry from the Irish model) don't value life after birth, while partially true, is still a straw man argument.
War and poverty are also the taking of innocent lives. It would be nice if all the pro life people became anti-war demonstrators and vegans. And if the church put all its funds toward raising unwanted children.
10
I can't understand why the Irish, after having been betrayed so many times by the Catholic Church, still cling to it so blindly.
It reminds me of the NRA supporters here, who cling to a loony view of the Second Amendment, no matter how much blood is on the floors of our schools and churches.
19
When men can become pregnant and religion is removed from the conversation then Maybe the question of abortion will be put to rest once and for all. No woman should ever be forced to carry a child who is the result of rape, incest or a sentence of death for both mother and child if brought to term. It’s like we’re living in the Middle Ages or under the thumb of ISIS. A complete waste of lives and resources.
11
JFK: I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote..(Houston, Sept 1960). Humanae Vitae encyclical:"...id docet necessarium esse, ut quilibet matrimonii usus ad vitam humanam procreandam per se destintas permanente." ie., every conjugal act must be open to the transmission of life! This is Pope Paul VI, 1968 . Well, such a lunatic assertion, the basis for the RCC opposing contraception, leaves no doubt that it is only great faith that sustains the RCC. A peculiar aspect: it refers to conjugal which I interpret from the context to refer to married couples. Perhaps, we've been wrong all along - is the prohibition only for married couples?
Like in the USA, so-called pro-life, Maria Steen's position is that the State should legislate on behalf of her moral belief(s). I respect her right to advocate but it is unacceptable to hijack the apparatus of a democracy to enforce her punitive views on women. Two items: NYT covered extensively 2 yrs ago a Colorado study showing drastic decrease in abortions in high schools with education and easy access to contraception. Zero response from US bishops. And, isn't it possible that repeal if combined with even more support for women will actually reduce abortions in Ireland?
3
Here is some history that Americans have forgotten!
Southern Baptist Convention Resolutions on Abortion
Resolution On Abortion, adopted at the SBC convention,
June 1971:
Be it further RESOLVED, That we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.
In 1968, Christianity Today, professor Bruce Waltke, of the famously conservative Dallas Theological Seminary, explained the Bible plainly teaches that life begins at birth:
“God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: 'If a man kills any human life he will be put to death' (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22–24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense… Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.”
5
Catholic heads of state were against birth control to ensure a large catholic population.
9
Dual national Irish -American. Raised Irish Catholic. Grandfather, married 43 years. Professor emeritus of technolgy and law , currently teaching ethics. I am totally completely and utterly pro choice.
Claims that fertilized eggs to fetuses are "babies" or "unborn Children" is simply a religious argument (ensoulment) dressed up as faux biology. DNA is simply a blueprint for a child. Pregnancy is the "natural" method of making a child. But until the process is finished it's a collection of parts and blueprints. Bricks and mortar and plans and parts are not a "house" . Viability outside the mother's body is a "reasonable" biological definition of a child that does not interfere with the integrity of another human being.
6
If the Christian political party, for that's what it is, in the USA isn't stopped from imposing their religious beliefs and practices on everyone in the USA we will be facing the same situation. Their Holy Grail is to reverse Rowe vs Wade. They want a state religion based upon fundamentalist Christianity.
9
We are already tithed to support churches. And don't forget the faith-based initiative.
Ms. Dowd should be talking about how the candidate she promoted (Trump) is actively and aggressively working to restrict a woman's right to choose.
7
Americans are marred by slavery as our "original sin." The Irish need to recognize the Catholic church as having been theirs. Neither can claim that their populations have yet to have evolved.
2
I wished you had looped in Trump and his newfound love of Evangelicals. Their anti-abortion insanity has now set its sights on women's health clinics. If they "refer a woman to an abortion clinic the would lose their funding." Really? Coming from Donald Trump? How many has he paid for?
Interesting in the same issue of the "NY Times" that there is reporting how Evangelicals were the ones also pushing for the American Embassy in Israel to move to Jerusalem. Why? So they can get their Rapture? Palestinians die, who cares. We get our Rapture.
It's all insane and Trump is very much responsible.
5
It’s not just in Ireland that the church has too much power. I’m an atheist. With all the turmoil in the heath industry I recently asked to get a vasectomy,my Jewish doctor had to refer me out of the Catholic hospital system that my old hospital had entered.
Ridiculous!
11
Excellent article. The best I’ve read from
Ms Dowd.
Well I hope they repeal it, but it is only the start of the political nonsense, as anyone knows from living in this country. People who see themselves as righteous are the worst sort.
3
Cells in a petri dish are ''babies'' and a person ( that happens to be a woman ) does lose her right to have complete control over their own bodies because of said cells. ( especially in cases of incest or rape )
Having said that, when women ( who make up more than 50% of the population ) finally get involved in their own destinies and make up the majority in governments, then the laws will reflect that truth from above.
I look forward to it.
4
It is the direction we are headed to here.
And that happens because people like Cecile Richards express shock, discomfort and are troubled when medical doctors enjoy a glass of wine with lunch as they discuss commercial transport of fetal body parts to laboratories.
Even worse is when people like Hillary Clinton call for a nationwide investigation of this perfectly legal practice.
It won't be long before we have the equivalent of Ireland's Eighth Amendment here as long as the reproductive health coalition in this country plays on the anti abortion side of the field.
They put up pictures of aborted fetuses? You put up pictures of butchered women. Or their children at mom's funeral.
2
There is no such thing as a safe abortion. It destroys the life of an innocent baby. I hope and pray that Ireland does not pass an abortion law. Many brave women and men have been demonstrating in the streets to keep abortion from being acceptable in their country. I hope they are successful in this very important battle. Your pro life comrades in America are rooting for you.
If you’re calling their current laws medieval, ours are cro-magnon. We can kill our offspring with legal protection up until the day of childbirth. No moral high horses here, please. We’re the barbarians.
Author Anne Enright's pro-repeal essay in the Guardian newspaper in March makes a brilliantly fresh, ethical argument about who gets to use a woman's body and on what terms:
"If a conceived embryo is already, and instantly, a full human being, this raises questions about what human beings can do to each other, and why. This is not the way I usually think . . . but if you want an absolute argument about all this, then here it is. What right does another human being have to be inside your body for the best part of a year, to make their way out of your private parts in a bloody, difficult and painful way, and then turn to you for nourishment, not to mention love – perhaps for the rest of your life?
"In the nine months occupation that is a pregnancy, the embryo has no agency, it doesn’t mean to be there, and no intention to cause harm. But an absence of intention does not confer any rights. Just because someone does not mean to use you does not give them the right to use you. The fact that an embryo can not ask for consent does not mean that consent must be given. An embryo takes no pleasure from its presence in your body, but this does not give it ownership of your body any more than a grown man has ownership over your body’s interior. . . .
"It may be argued that when a woman consents to unprotected sex she is also consenting to carry any resulting pregnancy to term, but I do not know if you can make an agreement with someone who does not yet exist."
8
Those who cry out the loudest against abortion - they are the ones who were aborted in a previous life and the experience is stamped in their characters.
Interview someone standing on the sidewalk or marching back and forth in front of a suspected abortion clinic. At the end of your conversation the anti-abortion person will ask, "Would you like that to happen to you,"? because it happened to them.
2
Spontaneous abortions still outnumber induced abortions.
6
Cells in a petri dish are ''babies'' and a person ( that happens to be a woman ) does lose her right to have complete control over their own bodies because of said cells. ( especially in cases of incest or rape )
Having said that, when women ( who make up more than 50% of the population ) finally get involved in their own destinies and make up the majority in governments, then the laws will reflect that truth from above.
I look forward to it.
1
Having gone through the experience of an abortion, as a man, I found it gut-wrenching that I had no say in the matter, because in the U.S. the woman has the right to choose. This is a point that deserves much more discussion.
In any event, I decided that I would support the decisions of others to have abortions but that I would never go through the experience again myself. That means being very careful with partners and ensuring that both of us are squarely on the same page with sex and family planning (or simply to engage in long-term abstinence). I certainly learned that contraception is the indispensable alternative to having to go through the process of an abortion. That can scar you for life. (And I consider myself a "liberal Democrat.")
This is all about controlling women’s sexuality.
7
I hope that Ireland is successful in its repeal of its abortion ban. My belief in regarding reproductive rights is that if you don't have two X chromosomes, you lack standing on this issue and are not entitled to an opinion.
5
What is missing in any discussion of abortion is the fact that we were all created with a free will given to us by our Creator. Our choices whether to lie about a friend, steal from a store, cheat on our taxes, drink to excess, shoot up a school, or terminate a pregnancy are ours alone. Many of our decisions impact others in ways large and small, regardless they remain our decisions and choices.
Steen is the Palin of this debate. Good looking , articulate and ideologically vicious.
4
Since I am not Irish Roman Catholic I don't care. The only Irish Roman Catholics who matter to and trouble me on women's reproductive sexual rights are my fellow Americans. And they and their clergy on this issue are hypocritical judgmental troglodytes trying to force their faith on my government and it's citizens.
3
Ms. Dowd helped get Trump and Pence elected. Now Planned Parenthood is under direct sttack. Can’t wait to see a column acknowledging her role in the upcoming inhumane tragedies flowing from that consequence of her smears of Hilary.
3
This issue is more about a male-dominated society (aka the patriarchy) and the Roman Catholic Church versus 21st century women wanting control over their bodies including their reproductive organs. This is the battle being fought here as Donald Trump, a notorious womanizer who doesn't bother to use birth control, is currently attempting to do the same by controlling women's access to reproductive medical care. At least in Ireland they're having a national referendum to change their Constitution. While our Supreme Court decades ago granted women the legal right to control their bodies, men like Donald Trump have been appeasing the religious right in their constant attempt to legislate their evangelical Christian religious morality on all women. The irony is that Donald Trump has earned his only straight "A"s for his "scarlet letter" record of philandering with a porn star and Playmate with evidently more soon to be revealed. The women of Ireland may be on the verge of no longer having their country "turning their on them" while that is exactly what Donald Trump and his male-dominated Republicans are doing here as we speak.
2
If men could get pregnant this issue would not be newsworthy.
2
The problem is not abortion or not. The problem is theocracy. The problem is always theocracy.
360
There was an excellent long-form article in The Times about Tuam. In addition to the 796 wee bodies buried in a septic tank, the surviving children were abused physically and emotionally by the nuns. They were referred to as "the spawn of Satan." To inflict that kind of torment on innocent children is appalling, and yet the same religious bigots insist that women deliver unwanted pregnancies. If we are going to throw around pejoratives, they should be reserved for those nuns that participated in this atrocity.
The same is true in the U.S. The religious right can bleat about every life being sacred, but reduce SNAP assistance to the poor, and make medical care all but impossible for so many people. Once the baby is born, their concern abruptly ends. I see the anti-abortion movement as a path to moral superiority on the cheap.
415
Agree - it's just words for personal or political gain and has nothing to do with principle. It's a play on words...the religious zealots are not pro-life, they are pro-birth and that's when the sanctity of life ends.
26
read this last year. It was never actually about abortion in the US...it was segregation. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-ori...
And this 1983 amendment was the last gasp of a theocratic Ireland. I'm an American Catholic, but (as in Ireland) the sex abuse issues from a church which won't allow me (a woman) to a position of full authority )the priesthood...well, I really don't believe much of what they say. Christ yes, his church on earth...not telling me what to do anymore.
17
The Scarlet Letter, an "A", in Hawthorne's memorable novel is forced onto a woman for "Adultery" - with a Puritan minister. But time passes. Decades later it is taken by those who know and lover her in exile to stand for "Able".
When Mrs. Hawthorne read the end of the book, she wept, for in it Hawthorne predicts that in future generations a day will come women never again suffer public condemnation for loving. Sad to say, women and men wait for that day when all people recognize women as "Able" to exercise freedom of choice over her own heart and body.
6
So, to have contraception the US a mandatory coverage by insurance gets the teen birth rate to an all time low. (Thanks Obamacare). If you want to lower the incidence of abortion, offer women local, low cost reproductive healthcare over their entire lives. Don't put law between a woman and her uterus. Any other position, no matte r how well intended, is pro baby killer. The pro Choice people are the ones that save babies' lives.
260
The pro Choice people are the ones that save babies' lives.
------
No, the facts are that millions of children have been aborted in this country since the practice was made legal.
It seems we have failed at educating young women on how to prevent conception, so they simply abort the unwanted. The numbers of potentially disabled that have been discarded cannot be denied. Pro-choice means selective killings. Nature means accepting life, even if you only define it by its imperfections...
This whole culture of death is what our society has become today. We use force, and guns, to overthrow governments we do not like, then wonder aloud why our young people pick up weapons as a first resort to solve their own problems. If we don't respect life, why should others?
2
@Midway: we must have failed at educating young MEN on how to prevent conception too.
Europe does not have a culture of death. Japan does not have a culture of death. Canada does not have a culture of death. Australia does not have a culture of death.
And yet all these countries are pro-choice, allowing ADULT women to make reproductive decisions, including abortion, regarding their own bodies and lives. The abortions are rare due to accessibility of contraception.
Unlike the U.S., mired in barbaric medieval religion--a country that cuts Planned Parenthood funding, SNAP funding, public school funding, burdens its youth with egregious higher ed debt, yet allows easy access to firearms--even for minors and the mentally ill.
A country that still--in the 21st Century with smart phone availability for every citizen--does not provide universal basic healthcare to all its citizens.
A country that masks its glaring selfishness with false religious piety.
Shameful. Absolutely shameful.
There has been, in this country, a steady chipping away of women's reproductive rights in this country, state by state. The GOP, led by Trump, is hell-bent on repealing Roe vs Wade. They started by attacking Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile infidelity, paying off women in turn for their silence and in a couple of cases, paying for abortions, is quite alright.
17
"Steen said her position was simple: “Don’t kill unborn children.”
There's a simpler message: mind your own business.
26
The whole abortion issue--a savaging of truth and a massacre of Christ's 2 Great commandments: love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
3
Having read this piece and Ross Douht's very different take on the issue I find Dowd's far more compelling.
6
Ross pretends that women can get an abortion. All they have to do is travel to England. Simple. Clean. BUT not affordable for many. Same thing here. Outlaw Roe v. Wade and wealthy women will do what they always did, go abroad. Easy. But only available to those with the money to do it.
What will really happen, and is happening here in Texas and other similar states, is that women of lesser means will either find a local abortionist or try to do it themselves risking life and fertility. But, they are only women. They are expendable.
If we sterilized males at puberty - a simple and often reversible outpatient procedure- and required written permission from their wives to have the procedure reversed when a baby is desired, we would make this whole debate moot. Not even rapists would be able to impregnate their victims. Win-win.
Aw, look at all the men blanching at the very thought! Poor babies! They have no idea what women go through. They are just sperm donors. Easy. Fun. No shame. Hot ticket in some circles. No responsibility. You got a problem with that?
8
oh please. no one worked harder to put Trump in the
White House who continues the war against women
and take away their rights
put a sock in it Ms. Dowd.
word
10
Thank you Bill B. Your comment really should be a Times Pick. It's the most accurate comment I've seen on this page.
1
No one cares about females in Ireland except horney men needing sex. Somehow, this antiabortion slop needs to stop and women need liberation from Catholics.
17
gee, i was thinking about how nice it would be to have a baby.... now? nah...... am i now a killer of an unborn child? i know my example is stupid..... but that's the problem. so is the idea that the state should have a say. all of this is way too personal for a government to be making and enforcing rules the infringe in an individuals right to be safe, healthy and free.
3
Mothers,
Please raise your sons not to hate women.
10
Next she'll be trying to give the unborn the right to vote...maybe by divine proxy as interpreted by the local priest?
5
Just 3 days ago, NYT ran another lead-in pic of a steely-gazing Irish woman (besides yours, of course)...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/technology/gdpr-helen-dixon.html
"...If Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t know who Helen Dixon is, he will soon...
So - riddle me this...
We now have a few American companies each now worth a few hundred billion dollars who've all for a while now followed a transoceanic yellow-brick road to the Emerald Isle to save a few tens of billions of dollars so they can offer leading-edge benefits to their female employees like in-vitro fertilization and egg-freezing that can cost tens of thousands of dollars each for each of tens of thousands of their employees...
http://fortune.com/2016/11/15/fertilityiq-rankings/
So what say they - on benefits for their female Irish employees...
Here in the US, which way a restroom door can legally swing greatly affects where these companies land their locations and largesse - or not...
This isn't the same as "running around with our shoes on in a Japanese house"...
It's more akin to walking into a house where domestic abuse is afoot - free beer notwithstanding...
PS
All of UK except Northern Ireland legalized abortion about a half-century ago - about the same time the last US anti-miscegenation laws were overturned…
In Virginia, of all places…
2
Yet another cult. The cult warriors of catholicism have raped pillaged and murdered since the 10th century, and that's only the popes I'm referring to.
9
See when she wants too... Maureen Dowd can write a column
2
A word to all anti-abortion hypocrites: if you're against abortion, don't have one.
Got it, Maria?
12
The point is the illegality in Ireland, not “choice”
1
Word to the wise: If you don't want a baby, don't conceive one.
You're not entitled to live in a society where we provide doctors who kill off your mistakes. How hard is it really to prevent pregnancy? (Not hard ladies. Learn some biology, and stop thinking of abortion as birth control, or a safety measure to help you plan the perfect child.)
If you can't handle the imperfections that come with being a parent and raising an independent life, maybe you shouldn't be having unprotected sex during your fertile times? Society does not owe you an abortion because you don't value the life you've created. Maybe wait to have procreative sex until you are ready to handle the consequences of your actions and have the education and maturity to understand where babies come from and how not to conceive if you don't want to deal with the results of procreative sex?
Good luck with that science, ladies. Education really is the greatest liberator, especially when you throw off the shackles that men want to get you pregnant and keep you down. If you stop playing the victim card, you'll be so much freer not to be a victim. And you won't need to kill your children either, to achieve equality yourself. Hth. God bless.
And I see that you also take all responsibility away from the man, as if a woman conceived on her own. This is part and parcel of the so-called pro life movement - forgetting that it also takes a man to make an unwanted baby.
1
Such a discouraging state of affairs in this day and age. But can we women not without fear ourselves juxtapose our present political reality in America with this dogmatically Catholic-controlled and patriarchal land across the Atlantic? The dilemma and suppression of women in Ireland reminds me of my Catholic education back in the 60's. We were taught that nothing less than emulating the Virgin Mary herself is expected in order to prevent us from the "fires of hell"...and that included in marriage (to whit, no birth control...yeah, right).
Now in 2018, I sense that Ms Dowd is perhaps, between the lines and with good cause, comparing our present evangelical Christian paradigm under the Trump administration with the religious anachronism of the Emerald Isle. We women who justly fight for the moral right to have total control over our own bodies and not be exploited or owned like slaves by others are sisters with those Irish ladies who yearn for and deserve the same. I wish them the best. And I hope they know that so many of us fully understand their angst and even anger.
4
I am curious as to how many of the anti-abortion ads in Ireland are funded by parties in the USA. We meddle - and I don't mean just the CIA - in other countries, too.
We are so good at hating each other, we'd like to export it.
3
Why no sense of the absurd for those on the anti-choice side who happily dress up the post-fetus being in a uniform and march them off to war? To be kill or killed. To quote Christopher Hitchens, "All politics is yokel."
7
Back to the back alleys, ah, in the name of religion.
6
Back alleys?
That's silly.
Don't you know the progress that has been made in eliminating conceptions or even eliminating pregnancies?
Haven't women learned anything of science in the past 50 years? Do people really believe they are still so ignorant as to rely on using abortion as birth control?
How hard is it really to prevent pregnancy -- or are women too meek to speak up and take actions to prevent conception? #MeToo appears to have created a subset of women who are in need of safe spaces because they have no personal autonomy of ability to act independently for their own good.
I think if governments stop subsidizing single women, suddenly there will be a mass wave of women who understand how to have sex with a man but not bear his child. Wanted children will be born; unwanted children will be put up for adoption, with no free check to the woman for having conceived and delivered. Then, there is no incentive to have sex and conceive irresponsibly. No payoff to the single woman.
We will need less abortion if people start taking the natural end results of procreative sex more seriously -- if it costs them personally, and not just the life of their child.
When religion, and the hypocrites that believe in it, go away, the world well be a much nicer place in which to live.
9
How utterly backward are the Irish on this issue, completely controlled by the church. Absolutely ridiculous.
The church has been losing its grip on Ireland for a long time now. As abuses have come to light, the people have questioned their historically loyalty to an organization that sold them out repeatedly.
3
I am surprised that the Irish are still swayed by the moral guidance of the Catholic Church after the pedophile scandals.
6
I guess will have to refer to the president now as Donald O'Trump who has earned two "A"'s already in the Scarlet Letter awards race for his admission of having unprotected sex with a porn star at the very same time he was also having a long-term extramarital affair with a Playmate. On second thought, Mr. O'Trump rates an A++ for a double infidelity. And, of course, he's making sure his genes propagate by making it harder for women to obtain abortions. That earns him a very special "A" (but it's one those unprintable words similar to one he used to describe country with black-skinned people).
3
Boycott travel to Ireland
1
And stay here in the US where our children are slaughtered at school
2
Jim Jefferies recently did a show on the Irish abortion debate. You can watch it on youtube.
1
Your recent articles have been engaging and informative, if not outright heartfelt. Nary a one on politics. Perhaps, Maureen, you realize you can't touch that subject without first writing your mea culpa?
1
I can't help but notice the extreme " don't kill unborn children " promoters are upper middle class, or even more. Sure, they have the money to raise more Children. What about all the rest, the NOT Rich ????
Yeah, thought so.
7
They also have the means to get safe abortions no matter what the law says.
3
Maureen,
99% of your columns are trite gossip.
But this time you addressed a serious issue, and did it well.
The only way to reduce abortions to zero is to offer free LARCs (long-acting reversible contraception) to all women. Well, that or sterilize all men.
2
The idea or concept of "aborting" life is dead. There are simply too many options now for unwanted or needing mothers. If there are complications, perhaps. But putting a time-stamp on a life is retarded.
At first glance one might wonder, why should Ireland's referendum on abortion matter to us? Think again.
The Republican Party is the party of men's control over women's bodies. Since Roe v. Wade, they have sought to overturn the law; circumvent the law; impose Papal law. As it exists in Ireland.
Senator McConnell outright stole a Supreme Court seat to put a Pence-values judge on the court.Trump is busy loading our courts with right-wing conservative, antiabortion Pence-values judges. In other words, our judiciary is undergoing a religious conversion to and immersion in Papal law. The reversal of Roe v. Wade is just one more Supreme Court appointment away.
And what will that mean for America when abortion is criminalized? It will put American women in the same dilemma as Irish women: if you have an unplanned, unwanted, life-threatening pregnancy, you must give birth and add to the surplus population.
And Pence-values judges are likely to uphold outlawing of contraceptives. Papists only approve of the rhythm method for married couples and abstinence for all others. Of course that does not mean Republicans will stop kissing and groping women without permission.
The new Trumpapist America will have a vulgar Evangelical Christianity: divorce banned (except for Trump), groping groins replacing handshakes, speaking truth frowned on, stating facts outlawed, science subject to strict religious oversight, and venereal disease and unmarried mothers making America great again.
271
Now, that's just silly.
How can you possibly ignore the oppression of minorities, and workers, as well as the chemical fouling of our nest that will accompany the misogyny?
12
I appreciate the focus on a woman's right to control her body and make her own medical decisions, but I think that isn't the bigger issue. What's more important to me is forcing a child to be brought into a family that doesn't want it, regardless of the reason. The "gift of life" is not so wonderful if you are unwanted and unloved. I think that if you could explain the to the fetus the reasons you want to abort and then ask them if they would like to be born anyway, most would say no.
8
The Irish have never been deeply religious, religion in Ireland was the thin veneer of civilisation. Sayings like Dia Agat (God to you) was responded to with Dia agus Mhuire agat (God and Mary to you) were common up to the mid fifties. Now replaced with Hi or Hello. Up until the Tiger most Irish were either on the farm or only one generation off the farm. Those people were familiar with abortions of cattle, pigs, horses, sheep. Each one of these was seen as a personal loss and guilt as to whether whatever was wrong should have been noticed ahead of time. The whole thrust was keeping crops and animals alive. Loss of children due to spontaneous abortion was a great tragedy and mourned accordingly. During the Tiger which ended in 2008 there was a wave of urbanization which reduced the number of people with the preservation of life mindset. This referendum may be 10 years too early for the Pro Choice side, but certainly another referendum in 20 years or so will be guaranteed victory. Like all Irish people I have had a religious upbringing and unlike some an excellent Catholic education. My children and grandchildren had very good Catholic educations . My children do not attend church and half my grand children attend church. Women and Education are holding the Catholic Church together for the past 50 years. Hatching, Matching and Dispatching are minor attractors. Three quarters of my life has been spent abroad and I am married to a German Lutheran.
1
I was once a Republican. The Irish can stop being Catholic. I understand that many of them already have.
13
THe fact is abortion has nothing to do with either
religion or politicians. It has to do with biology.
A blastocyte is not a human. Nature aborts zygotes all the time.
No woman should ever be forced to procrate against her will. If you don't " believe" in abortions then don't have one. But don't use the phony argument that god cares one way or the other.
And it's particularly galling that tired old white men get to control women's reproduction.
I don't see a single politician out there , or person, willing to support a child after it is born.
13
Ross Douthat thinks it’s fine if women die, just so the baby makes it. I despise the selfishness of all men who want to control women’s bodies that they’ve never met..Now they actually want to control what birth control women use, because it will help them get to heaven??
16
America, this can and will happen anywhere. Coming soon to a state near you and the future of our Supreme Court is beginning to look Swiss cheese; no longer the rock it once was. Thank you Maureen Dowd. We ara riven.
11
If ever abortion is again made illegal in the United States, it will be the end of evangelicals involvement in politics and it will be the end of republican majorities in Washington for many decades. And the republicans know this. They dance on a very fine edge. And Trump is eroding their edge.
3
Apologies in advance for my ignorance, it seems odd that NI would have similar restrictions.
In 1749, yes, no mistake, 1749, the Franciscan Francesco Cangiamila published his "Sacred Embriology (Embriologia Sacra). The book reversed centuries of belief that the fetus was an apple hanging from a tree, the mother, hence, not an independent being. Canon lawyers supported this. The soul, that is, life, was said to enter only after about 16 weeks. Then came Cangiamila, reflecting current scientific thought, to say the soul entered at conception. Even the recently created fetus could be baptized. The book spread over continents. The results have been documented for Peru for this time, showing Cesarian sections (a death sentence, of course) being performed on women with dangerous labors, on dying women as well, to baptize the surviving parts of a fetus.
The doctrine of abortion as we hear it today is anything but fundamental to Catholic/Christian theology. It is a new invention. It imposes strictly confessional concepts of the soul on everyone, violating the First Amendment. Any attempt to say that today's scientific criteria determine there is life at conception are really colored by Cangiamila's thinking. Of course, there is life in a technical sense, but that life is really what the medievals said (who, by the way, would not have baptized a fetus), an apple hanging from the tree. And there are moments when an apple should be picked before it is fully ripe.
6
Human population on this planet grows exponentially. Refugees everywhere are flooding the free world. We are running out of space. In many parts of the world there's no water, vegetation is burning, food is scarce, floods are killing people while changing the landscape, and it's not getting better. This planet can only sustain so many living things. Christian morality was - and unfortunately still is - the religious drug used to control the masses who have been reduced to herd animals and don't understand that slave morality destroys the will to understand reality and rise above average. Compassion in Christianized culture preserves that which should have perished long time ago. Time has come to let women have a right to their body. The whole abortion issue is really simple: If you don't want an abortion, don't have one.
9
The decision to abort a pregnancy — treat it as a matter of personal autonomy.
8
I am an American living in Dublin almost two decades. When I was 22 weeks pregnant, the news broke in Ireland about Savita’s death. I was shocked and sickened. My own OB had to reassure me in very careful terms that he would not let anything happen to me. I thought about Savita for the rest of my pregnancy, and about the risk that I was in by just having a baby in Ireland. The anti abortion side here is losing the argument and get aggressive in debates and with the media when they are called out.
My vote card arrived in the mail today. My hashtag on Friday will be #RememberSavita, and #RememberAnnLovett, and the countless other women who have died as a result of what is a religious-inspired law designed to control people.
17
Bravo to David Underwood's comment about making laws based on superstition. How long will ancient superstition persevere? It's a planetary delusion. Reason completely abandoned.
H.L. Mencken wrote a short essay about extinct Gods. Zeus makes as much sense as Yawheh, God the "Father", or Allah. The behavior and commands of these gods are all obviously imitations of humans, often at their murdering worst. These Abrahamic monotheisms(whoops, what about the polytheistic trilogy and human sacrifice of one's child rubbish-repeat of the "kill Isaac" tale but completed)) are the current fashionable delusions about non existent man-like Gods.
Religion is supposed to be separated from the state in the US. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Now we have the pathetic mockery of a sinner supreme taking away Federal money for Planned Parenthood if they don't do what his evangelical base wants. How dare anyone on the right talk about SMALL government ever again.
Massive unnecessary debt added (just what happened to insulting big spending Democrats and being austerity fanatics?) and sticking their religious noses into the personal lives of others, especially women.
Mankind just refuses to learn, law by fairy tale.
8
How can it be that we are still, in 2018, debating a womans right to guide her own body though her life?
Any law that interferes with a womans right to choose childbirth or not is immoral and anti-woman. Anti-abortion laws are a war on the poor. The wealthy don't suffer.
If a child is born that was unwanted, is it awarded a life time of financial and psychological services? I hope so, because that child will be raised with either resentment or abuse - possibly both. And we will suffer the societal consequences.
Let's face it. There are way too many humans on this earth and we are watching the destructive impact daily. If one cares to pay attention.
From a planetary and women's rights point of view we should be encouraging and supporting all forms of birth control and sex education to minimize abortions. But when an abortion is discussed, it should be between the woman and who she chooses the counsel of - it could be her mate, her doctor, her friends. The government has no business being involved - at any point in the pregnancy. Let's talk about the human rights of the living - not the fantasy life of an embryo.
It is pathetically ironic that the same voices that shout "Stop killing unborn children" vote to cut funding for the social services required by the very same families burdened with unwanted children. Instead they speak of abstinence and God's word. The arrogance of the pro-life movement is only eclipsed by it's ignorance and totalitarian desires.
14
We're headed for the Irish "solution" under Trump. He reportedly didn't use condoms and married two of the women he apparently impregnated during extramarital sex. Evangelicals forgive Trump because he's committed to ending legal abortion.
2
Pro choice people (code word for abortion) are always talking about the rights of the women. What about the rights of the life in the womb? They should be given dignity and treated with respect. I am so glad the pro life Irish are fighting this good fight and not giving up on the unborn. They are to be commended and I hope they are triumphant on Friday. I wish you the luck of the Irish.
1
There is no luck in being a pregnant woman in distress in Ireland.
5
I notice in the article the tragic circumstances of many women in Ireland and wonder if a more humane solution to their predicaments, other than termination, might have been found, with modern methods and attitudes.
What is glaringly absent, however, in Ms. Dowd's piece, is any concession to uncomfortable questions about extinguishing a human being in his/her early stages of development. That feckless doctors mistreated a desperately sick moribund Indian woman shouldn't obscure the central question of when should a civilized society protect the life of a growing womb-bound human baby! No mother must face death for child she bears!
But no parade of horribles should extinguish the profound empathy we should have for a fellow human being who is womb-enveloped and gathering all the powers that have made her "the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals, noble in reason and in action like an angel."
Noble human reason may rescue nature from some of its deadly limitations but it can't and shouldn't attempt to repeal nature itself by pursuing deadly final solutions to eliminate all of its imperfections.
Were Bridget to have known what we now know through science about developing womb-bound children she'd no doubt hang a petition to defeat repeal on the ancient Yew tree next to her Well near Clare.
Hey, I'm ok with a strict abortion law, as long as those who mandate it...
Place every unwanted child into a loving home.
Pays for the cost of drug withdrawal after birth.
Educates the child
Provides free health care to the child
Make sure the child goes to a trade school or college
Allows the child to meet his or her natural parents if requested by child.
etc...
4
Three years ago the Irish voter approved a measure ending in an unprecedented way a piece of the country's history of obscurantism. I will quote the May 24, 2015 issue of the New York Times:
DUBLIN — Ireland became the first nation to approve same-sex marriage by a popular vote, sweeping aside the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church in a resounding victory Saturday for the gay rights movement and placing the country at the vanguard of social change.
I have no doubt that Amendment 8 will be repealed.
1
I read this somewhere:
Nobody likes an abortion
Nobody plans to have one
Nobody has one on a whim
My religious beliefs are my own and I won't impose them on anybody else, nor should any woman die because of mine or anyone else's religious beliefs.
11
For almost 1,000 years, England tormented the Irish.
Now that Ireland is free, it seems they can't stand not being tormented. The Catholic Church, which used to be their protector is now tormenting them -- a bit, anyway.
3
I cannot imagine a more gut wrenching decision that a woman could make. To forcibly inject government into that decision is the most heinous of acts. We see the "Handmaid's Tale" as fiction, but in countries that assume control of a woman's body in the name of some unseen "god" it is all too real. It is also profoundly wrong to utterly disenfranchise a woman from a decision that is her's and her's alone.
3
So far the New York Times has not commented on the contradiction: that the same liberals who cheer that the Irish will be able to vote on abortion policy are totally opposed to any such election here. Even when local elections change abortion law in a way they don't like, they run to the courts and ask them to strike down the laws. Ireland is a more democractic country than the US.
The lack of respect for women is pre 1963. Stunning.
6
I wonder what kind of laws we would have if the male-female roles were reversed. How would men respond to women telling them what they can do with their bodies? Mitch would demand male presence in a room of females making decisions on health care. I would hope they would let Elizabeth Warren throw the Kentucky bum out.
3
I remain appalled at the cruelty and ignorance of those who insist it's murdering a baby to have an abortion. They know nothing of biology, psychology or history. Four children being home-schooled by their mother is a red flag; she is fearful of the world in which they will have to live. I'm half Irish and am well-versed in the history of the land but women have been subjugated. Sometimes it's other women who are the jailers.
7
As long as people persist in belief in the supernatural, i.e. a supreme non- or super-human being, a god, and the existence of a soul, AND incorporate those unprovable mystic beliefs into laws, humans will suffer and die.
The underlying dynamic is a condemnation of natural human sexual activity for the sake of pleasure. If the human race continues to evolve religion itself will join slavery as an institution that was an institution that, in more primitive times, was acceptable.
It's just a matter of time.
3
Abortion is going to be outlawed in much of the US once Trump gets another Justice on the Supreme Court. I'd say maybe five years at the most and abortion is gone.
It won’t be gone. Just unsafe for women who don’t have means
1
If we could remove people like Una Mullaly and their ignorance from discussions on controversial topics, we could have much more civilized discussions.
She writes (and Ms Dowd clearly approves), in response to the slogan “Don’t kill unborn children," that “The mind boggles at how you seek to uphold a system where women are not allowed to make choices for themselves.”
This is utter nonsense!! The mind does not boggle. Absolutely women should have the right to choose.
But anyone who has made even a half-hearted attempt to listen to the pro-Life side knows that their position is not about depriving women of choice - rather, they see this as an unintended and unfortunate consequence of a principle which they hold to be universal and even more important than the woman's right to choose.
We may (and I do) strongly disagree with their position, but to suggest that it is difficult to understand is just insulting to the intelligence of the average pro-choice person.
If you find yourself among those few who are truly unable to understand their thinking, try to remove the word "unborn" - you get the phrase "Don't kill children". Do you agree that even a woman should not have the right to kill her children? Surely you do. So now, you have understood their position.
Intellectually, you don't agree that the comparison is valid or even meaningful. But they do. Once you grasp this, you start to understand their actions, and you're in a better position to constructively disagree!
The right wing zealots line the roads with their signs against abortion. The all love the unborn fetus, however when the fetus becomes a child with needs the same right wing zealots want to cut food stamps and health care.
I am a transplant from a large city in the Midwest living here in rural western Montana. I was in a Doctor's waiting room listening to this middle age woman going on about the evils of abortion. I told her there are many unwanted children in the inner cities, maybe she should adopt one. That shut her up. Small minds and smaller brains, Donald's voters.
8
Yes it’s a lot easier to self righteously rail against abortion than it is to personally raise children that they insist be born.
3
Evidently the "publicity" barrage by the No side has been relentless. Chances were much better for a repeal a year ago. Hoping that Ireland continues to evolve. And could someone please correct "a homage."
It is women enforcing social control over and shaming other women more than men do.
When women support other women, then women achieve progress. When women see other women as rivals for every sort of desirable resource, they will savagely marginalize anyone who crosses the imaginary line arbitrarily established.
Fix women's attitudes and you won't need to worry anything about what men think or want in relation to them.
2
When I am in Italy, I go to magnificent Catholic Churches, look at the stunning art, and am almost willing to forgive the Church for what it did to my Jewish ancestors. After all, it was a long time ago and after Vatican 2, Jews are no longer accused of deicide. And then I remember how the Church treats women today. Forcing women to conceive and bear unwanted children is just as bad as forcing unwanted baptism on non-Christians and then putting them to death because they secretly adhered to their own religion. Indeed, how is the ban on abortion not a violation of religious freedom? Was Savita a Catholic? I doubt it. Does it mean that every Jew, Muslim, Hindu and atheist living in Ireland has to obey the theological diktat of the Catholic Church?
In the Middle Ages, Jews who were forcibly baptized were called “Anusim”, “the raped ones”. Now it is women who are raped in body and spirit.
3
"Right to Life" and "Pro-Life"—
Are broad strokes that miss all the subtlety.
A physician MD
2
Thank you Maureen for a thoughtful and well sourced piece on a difficult subject. Those of us who support a woman’s right to make decisions about her own health and future know that abortion is an extremely difficult decision but sometimes the only healthy choice .
4
I get a view, thankfully my only view, of right-wing "ideology" when my wife's father, a Fox devotee, visits. Recently he tried to engage me in a discussion about "when life begins", and it was abundantly clear that the right-wing position is that it begins with a discernable fetal heartbeat. His position is that at that moment the fetus is a "person", thereby protected by law. I tried to bring the discussion to "difficult" situations such as you pose in this column, but as I expected to absolutely no avail. The life of the mother, either literally or metaphorically, is of absolutely no consequence on the right. They are willingly ignorant of the fact that religious canon regarding birth control and abortion emanates from a time of empire building, the goal being rapid population growth. It is a dysfunctional and downright cruel combination of that ignorance combined with a holier-than-thou puritanical streak that drives the right. Life has nothing to do with it, but playing God has everything to do with it. And where I come from those women in "difficult situations" are God's creatures too. For their sake, I hope Ireland shows mercy and demonstrates enlightenment on Friday.
23
In my homeland of Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, we don't have the same rights as other British subjects.
Thanks to the fun folks at the DUP we have neither access to abortion or same sex marriage, the Iona Institute and other charmers such as precious life are active in Northern Ireland and hound people attempting to visit the one family planning clinic in Belfast.
I was asked to sign a petition to ensure the status quo is maintained by an idealistic young woman in Belfast city centre while I was carrying my infant son, I declined saying a 15 year old who'd been raped by her father should have a choice. The look of sheer horror on her face hopefully changed some of her preconceptions about those seeking an abortion.
34
Substitute the word "Ireland" with the word "Alabama" and much of this story remains the same today. Except here the forces of ignorance and misogyny are ascendant. At least Ireland is taking steps to join the 21st century and put its regressive past behind it.
67
The Irish pro lifers have been canvassing door to door to convince the people that abortion is immoral and inhumane. It seems to have worked as more folks have seen the devastation to not only the baby but the mother too. They are finally seeing that abortion ends the life of an innocent baby. It has been so encouraging to see young and old, men and women supporting this very important cause. It has restored my faith in humanity and I hope these people are able to stop from making abortion legal in this wonderful country.
4
Yes, it is pretty devastating when a woman dies of septic shock because doctors won't (not can't, WON'T) treat her and save her life. The fetus was dying, and you're ok with her mother dying too?
7
Did you read the article? Laws against abortion DON'T stop abortions, they just drive them underground. Women leave the country to get an abortion, they stick a knitting needle into their uterus to get an abortion, they take unsafe medications to get an abortion, and they often die. And countries that would allow a woman like the Indian immigrant who developed sepsis to die (along with the baby, I might add), is positively medieval! Stop wallowing in your sanctimony and look at this issue with clearer eyes!
6
Every serial killer and rapist was once an "innocent" baby. What happened to them?
4
What any person has to say about a woman's choice to have a procedure which is hers and hers alone to undergo is suitable in any nation which claims to be free while at the same time none of that person's business.
Women are not slaves to anyone.
55
Those who are adamantly against a women's right to choose and be stewards of their own body are more pro birth than pro life. Where is the discussion of the destructive effect on an unwonted child, it's mother and society irself? Those who are anti abortion should be actively adopting a parent less child. They would then more moral suasion.
25
Excellent, heart rending, good historical and current story about Ireland, and, about the USA.
14
Women have long paid the price and borne the shame for being pregnant out of wedlock in Ireland and elsewhere. Men like your uncle, Maureen bore no stigma for being unwed fathers, as you pointed out. Women as you stated, ended up in the Magdalene Laundries to do penance and provide what amounted to slave labor. But unwanted children also paid a price in Ireland as well. Many wound up in state-sponsored, church-run schools (that existed into the 1990's) where physical, sexual, and emotional abuse were rampant. I have long wondered why anyone would choose to stay in a religion that allowed widespread abuse of all kinds to continue for decades.
I hope the women of Ireland will be given the right to make decisions concerning their own bodies. It is such a basic right, that has long been denied to too many women. Right now in the U.S. we are in danger of turning back the clock to the good old days when women did not have the right to choose. The religious right is working feverishly to have Roe vs Wade overturned. Just as Irish women have been forced to go to a different country to have an abortion, women here might end up in the same situation if we allow Draconian measures to once again be imposed on women here.
37
Abortion as a form of birth control should be dissuaded, but not made illegal.
Those who are concerned about the unborn should also be concerned about the mothers who die because of complications such as ones involving the "hard cases" mentioned in this column.
To force a woman to carry the child resulting from a rape or incest is beyond cruel. It is long past time for Ireland to stop being "obsessed with punishing women," as Niall O’Dowd put it.
23
Rarely mentioned in the abortion debate is how profligate God (or Nature) is with abortions. As many as 32% of all pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion, also called miscarriage. Each one of those pregnancies involved a potential life; Many do not involve fetal abnormalities but simply end.
That number doesn’t include failed implantation rates—unions of sperm and egg, little potential humans, that drift by the womb instead of lodging there. If God can be so cavalier with all these precious souls, why the frenzy over human abortions?
22
To paraphrase President Obama: Don't get mad, get parity.
Most women want autonomy over their bodies. To have that they need parity in government.
Maria Steen may be a woman but she doesn't represent the vast majority of women who want to have agency over their uteri.
19
Ms. Dowd, I appreciate your column. Ireland is too easy a target because of its former devotion to the Catholic Church and the uncovering of sexual abuse crimes. The child in the womb is innocent and defenseless. Good Counsel Homes helps mothers during and after pregnancy. My sister had a daughter over 40 years ago; my sister was assaulted in a halfway house. Ann was paranoid schizophrenic. My parents supported her, helped her put Eileen into Catholic Services for adoption. Eileen grew up in a great family and is a highly educated social worker.
2
One can be pro-life in the real sense, not political label, and pro women’s choice about their own body.
I argue that abortion should be a last choice but support women having the final say about their own body.
If politicians spent the time they spend on controlling women’s rights on supporting healthy living, we’d have a healthier society for all.
2
"Prohibition makes a criminal of a man (person) who is not a criminal." Abraham Lincoln.
Prohibition, whether of alcohol, marijuana or abortion has never prohibited anything.
Prohibition of abortion is a religious argument and does not belong in criminal law. The abortion debate has created more division in our country than any other issue.
More than ever we must endeavor to maintain our separation of church and state. Too many sketchy politicians get elected because they cater to the so called 'Religious Right'.
22
Thank you, William. This cannot be said too often. As we look around the globe, as well as at home, we can readily see the consequences of binding church and state. Prohibition and suppression is always the result.
7
Excellent succinct points.
1
Seamus Heaney's beautiful poem, Limbo, about what pregnant women go through in countries where they have no choice:
https://allpoetry.com/poem/11030643-Limbo-by-Seamus-Heaney
4
A similar level of misogyny exists in laws here in the U.S. - in which several states grant rapists parental rights to the children resulting in their acts of rape.
Those parental rights not only mean that a vile, violent criminal is allowed access to a child - it means that vile criminal also gets to have access to his victim for the next 18 years and gets to know where she lives.
The rapist then gets to control his victim's life - he can prevent her from moving out of state or too far away for him to visit the child.
And yes, in many places in this country, a rapist can prevent his victim from putting up the child for adoption.
Think this is too outrageous to be true? Look it up.
Often, the very same people, laws, and cultural attitudes that seek to criminalize abortion are those that cause a girl or woman to seek an abortion:
Putting a woman in an impossibly unjust situation such as the one I describe; denying girls and women accurate sex education and contraception; shaming women for sex; denying justice to women and girls who are raped or sexually assaulted; cutting Medicaid and food aid; denying health care, special education and other support to families with children who are ill or disabled; and a culture that punishes the poor and devalues children who are disabled.
Righting these wrongs would be truly pro-life.
32
Just out of curiosity - If the Vatican said abortion is a woman's right to choose, would Irish pro-lifers change their vote? I respect people making choices based on their personal belief, but arguing so passionately based on second-hand thought from a religious organization, be it a Church or a Mosque or Temple or Politburo is not personal belief, it is sheep-dom.
Ultimately we are a community of people. The Cardinals in the Vatican or Mullahs in Qom or Imams in Mecca are not going to come to your house to put out a fire, or give you CPR when you have a heart attack. It is your neighbors and community who will be there for you. Think for yourself, and think with compassion, not righteous arrogance. We all have so much to be modest about. Saying "Forgive the Sinner" is easy, actually doing it is difficult.
10
Thank you. I say "Amen" to your post. And when you speak of the "Church or a Mosque or Temple or Politburo", let us not forget that it is men who dominate those institutions. My proposal is that, while each of us should consult her/his conscience on this and other moral questions, we men shut our mouths about abortion for, say, the next hundred years.
3
This is a near intractable issue. I feel for the country of most of my ancestry and applaud its gradual unshackling from the bonds of the unholy Church. Go well, all.
Regardless the government regulation of abortion, much can be done to keep the desire for it arising as much. Comprehensive, wholistic and frank sex education (yes, SEX education, not deluded moralistic education limited to "godliness" and abstinence) quality conception control (please, let's stop calling it "birth control" - that just plays into the rabid right's hands), and family planning, along with the full panoply of women's - and men's - sexual health care, should be provided everywhere.
Unfortunately, that wise provision is not the case in America, where antiquated authoritarian preachers control legislatures and half the Congress, and an already near-lame duck president plays to his base out of panic for his survival.
14
I am pro-choice and pro-death-penalty. I think to uncouple the two is hypocritical. All the logic against the death penalty must also be applied to abortion, and since that is true, I must be pro-death-penalty because as a man it is wrong for me to want to dictate anti-abortion requirements to women.
Without becoming anti-abortion, I recognize that killing an embryo or fetus is killing it. The potential for a good life of most aborted embryos or fetuses is greater than the good-life potential of a typical sociopath that would logically be put to death as punishment or to remove a danger to society.
I believe these are simple facts. And one of the main problems with discourse today is that the hypocrisy and illogical reasoning layered over both political-sides on this issue renders everyone hopelessly at odds with each other.
1
Of course, that logic demands that those who are anti-abortion must be anti-death penalty. You are not arguing "simple facts", but simplistic conclusions.
I am pro choice and have made modest monthly contributions to Planned Parenthood for several years. Still, I would like to see the abortion rate decrease. But the right way to do this is through effective, universal sex education, readily available birth control methods and a safe and effective morning after pill. I would really like to hear the argument and rationale for banning birth control. As far as I know, Jesus never discussed it. What makes a supposedly celibate clergy person an expert on consensual sex between adults? Is it just a “Because I said so” dogma? It makes no sense to me. I love my children, but I don’t want several dozen of them.
378
Ah, the church has an answer for you if you don't want more children. Stop having sex. They don't follow that advice personally, mind you, but they are even more special than the average guy.
30
Yeah, a bunch of men who say they never have sex (but many of whom do), telling other men and women that when they do have sex, it's only supposed to be with the intention of making a baby (every time!)
Perhaps the only thing more absurd than that is the fact they actually got away with that bizarre nonsense for so many centuries.
But how they got away with it was by wielding power and punishment, whenever the brainwashing didn't work (or with that threat of punishment as a permanently lurking part of the brainwashing process).
Thankfully the tide of history has turned.
And I make that observation as someone for whom being a parent has been without doubt the greatest experience of my life.
26
Any "argument" is based on how you interpret the word "life." If "life" starts at conception, then abortion is murder. If "life" starts when the fetus is viable (say, 20 weeks) then early abortion and simply remove cells from the uterus. If the egg is not fertilized (birth control) how can one claim there is anything wrong with it? Science is not clear when life begins, so we are left with religious dogma or moral reasoning to base our "arguments." Birth control makes logical sense, but religion is typically anti-logical. Looking for rational arguments is fruitless.
11
Trump and the GOP are defunding Planned Parenthood on the hope that it will prevent abortion counseling, and abortions. This is driven by the religious fanatics who are pandered to and then used to create an effective political wedge.
I join many others in making monthly contributions to PP. Two of my daughters who, once they were on their own, relied on PP for birth control and examinations. A physical at a PP clinic can be had for a paltry $105, if they can afford that. If not, it is free.
We are well into the 21st century. Yet, women, and too many men, are still in the middle ages: Evolution held down by organized religion. Women are waking up to this now so we can be encouraged.
12
People like to ignore that there's an element of risk in any pregnancy. I've borne three children and my body bears the marks of that experience. Some of the effects are trivial, but others can be life threatening.
I've known two women who died from being pregnant. It's fortunate that pregnancy-related mortality is not so frequent as it once was, but it's still a possibility.
I know another woman who is crippled because of a pregnancy-related stroke. There is also risk of toxemia and diabetes.
Almost all women who have been pregnant suffer some degree of incontinence. Others have prolapses of the uterus and the intestines.
Postpartum depression is more common than most of us realize. It reflects the impact of physiology and psychology.
For many years, women who wanted to prevent pregnancies used herbal contraceptives and abortifacients. They were imprecise and presented their own dangers.
The dangers to women is enough reason for me to believe that abortion ought to be a private decision made by the woman. People who believe every pregnancy is a gift from God will make different decisions from those who believe a fetus is a cluster of cells. That ought to be the end of the story.
17
What Ireland and the Catholic Church appear to be suffering from is not the notion of what defines human life and its value. There is evidence and consensus that life begins in the womb and is always valuable. The controversy - and the crime - is rooted in the application of rules devised by a patriarchal hierarchy. Women are entitled to make decisions about how, when and if to conceive. Until these entitlements are fully respected by church and state and mothers and fathers, women and children will continue to suffer. When they are realized, unwanted pregnancy (wed or unwed) will become a rare event that can be addressed with human empathy and compassion rather than violence.
7
For our societies to decide what to do, we must acknowledge that the heart of the debate in Ireland and the US is more emotional than rational. If one believes that all abortions are murder, then outrage and disgust will drive the debate. If, on the other hand, one believes that abortions allow women to determine their fate and that the pro-life side is actually a forced birth movement, then outrage will drive the debate on the other side. Emotion and attitudes about sex, punishment, religion, science, women's rights, paternalism and autonomy need to be discussed as Ireland ponders its vote and the US is on the verge of moving into the past.
14
I think it is harder than that. Of course an unborn baby is a human being and of course killing it is murder. But equally, medical and personal and social circumstances can make a woman want an abortion. What it comes down to is that we are like God in that we create life, both as mums and as dads. But the woman is the person who actually makes and holds the child, and it is crucially her care that will allow the little girl or boy to survive and hopefully, thrive. So if she decides to terminate her pregnancy -- abort-- society should stand back and respect that, sad as it is. People with other ideas can apply them to their own selves but not force others to submit to their beliefs. Enough harm has been done by that throughout history! But behind all this is the refusal to understand and accept sexuality, particularly in the context of growing up, where the roots of the misbehavior and fallibility of women but especially men are to be found. Sex education is not something to learn in the classroom but in real life. Shocking? Yes, sorry. There's just no other way. Little by little as people grow up, they should learn sex. Sex as a basic building block of society, as respect, as intimacy, as friendship, as knowledge. As ecstasy. When? Whenever nature so ordains. Along with that, they must learn the spiritual register that the body also is, besides sex; something yoga teaches. Finally they will be fully educated human beings. And Oh, I forget: they should get some schooling too.
It's a bit surprising that this column omitted any reference to the interference and funding from organisations in the US and other European countries in our referendum. The decision by Google to refuse advertising is also something relevant to Americans. At least in Ireland we allow citizens a direct vote in a referendum and hopefully we get a good turnout. There is concern about men choosing not to vote.
I think our ongoing investigation into the cervical check fiasco will influence thinking about public health issues for many years to come.
1
I’m not sure that Maureen has quite captured the issue that many voters are contending with ie is abortion up to 12 weeks (and with a medical opinion beyond this) the only response to the issues posed by the so called hard cases. While the issue of a woman’s right to choose is correctly at the centre of things, voters are being asked to support a shift from a situation of no abortion to one of relative freedom without much real discussion of what this may mean or what the alternatives may be. There is also something of an echo chamber in the media about repeal where other voices are given short shrift. Given that Ireland is currently estimated to have 3000 abortions per year whereas the UK, with a population 15 times larger, has 170 thousand abortions (or 3.5 times greater), what does a change of the law imply in terms of normalizing abortion. Many people are grappling with these issues of recognizing both the rights of the mother and the moral issues that surround this. Putting things in the context only of the Catholic Church is off the mark as the Church itself has been absent from the debate. If this indeed is a moral issue, this should be respected without portraying this as some type of ultra montane and reactionary choice.
3
A friend is thinking of moving overseas. He asked me if I would move to Ireland. I said "sure, now that I'm past childbearing age"
14
Actually, we have things for families you don't in the US, like paid maternity and paternity leave by law and free preschool. We also have a lower maternal mortality rate than the US consistently according to the WHO: http://gamapserver.who.int/gho/interactive_charts/mdg5_mm/tablet/atlas.html
15
What's more, you can actually vote on abortion law, which we are forbidden to do in the US.
All good - If you wanted to be pregnant
Just returned from two weeks in Ireland. My wife and I saw a good bit of the west coast and Dublin. Everywhere we went we saw signs for and against the legislation. If the signage is any indication it’s going to be a close vote.
4
Ireland doesn't stop abortion. Ireland stops safe, legal abortions, and sometimes medical procedures necessary to save women's lives in miscarriages. Ireland needs to join the modern world and fully enfranchise women and their choices. Gay marriage was legalized in part because so many of its beneficiaries are men. The fact that women are the prime beneficiaries of the legalization of abortion are women, sadly, robs it of impetus in this vote. Ireland needs to take this much-needed step toward gender equality, which is still just a dream in a land mired in Catholic misogyny.
70
What's interesting is the fact that in the SSM vote, 42 of the 43 constituencies passed the SSM referendum. Roscommon-South Leitrim, by a narrow "no" vote, failed to pass it. So much for Catholic men/women and their church's teachings about same-sex relations!!
But abortion - that's "different!!"
1
While Ireland decides whether to remain a country which demonizes and criminalizes women who want to control their own bodies and destinies, America is backsliding into that same scenario. This will be us in a few years when one or more judges on the Supreme Court can no longer hold on to their positions. It’s unbelievable.
68
My cousin, and his wife, were in their 20s when their first child was born with Downs Syndrome. She is their eldest, with a few more born later to the healthy couple.
I think the family considers her a blessing. She is in her teens now. Ireland accepts disabled children better than Americans, I think.
8
Looking after a child with disabilities can mean taking on a lifelong responsibility, one that few parents can cope with adequately, often at the expense of other children they might have. Even a child with a mild disability can mean extra time and money that most families do not have.
I should know: I was born with a mild case of cerebral palsy that affected the right side of my body. My parents spent thousands of hours doing at home exercises and driving me to rehab appointments while attempting to balance home and job responsibilities. It strained their marriage and their ability to care for my two younger brothers.
Every woman should have the right to decide whether or not she becomes a parent after considering the reality of a child with disabilities, rather than the idea of it.
35
We do pretty well for the disabled, compared to how it used to be. But then, the Trump administration is cutting back on protections of the ADA, so I don't know what the republicans may have in mind. Even now, the passion in many states for cutting taxes and lack of willingness to financially support disabled children born to the poor or to provide the expensive medical care needed makes the "blessing" one that only people of means can afford. For those without, it's a dreadful road to travel. Perhaps you're willing to raise taxes to provide for the children of the poor, including the disabled. I'd be interested to hear if that's your idea.
51
@Midway: Ireland also accepts dead mothers better than Americans do (give or take a few million evangelicals and the politicians who lust after their votes).
39
Welcome to America a few years from now if one more conservative justice gets on the Supreme Court. If there's a better reason to vote Democrat this year I'm not aware of it. Anthony Kennedy, RBG: live long and prosper.
111
And just wait until a GOP-controlled Court rolls back the free press ... only Fox News permitted.
2
It's surely time for Ireland, the country where my parents were born, to shed the 1983 addition to the 8th amendment and adopt laws that enable women to make life choices on their own rather than by catechism and religious fear, pressure, and tradition.
Ireland, in so many ways a modern country, needs to take that next step and leave the constraints and fears of the 19th and 20th centuries behind.
Please, people of Ireland, do not remain in the mental trap that has taken hold of so many US states and politicians.
62
ONLY FEMALE SUFFRAGE ON THIS 'BODY CONTROL LAW'
I've always thought that true liberty would involve full control over one's own body. This means all citizens could determine their own physical, material fate during their brief time on earth.
Women have been given the 'burden' of using their bodies to ensure the survival of our species. Men have not.
It would seem ethically just for only women to vote on such a law that regulates their bodies alone.
Men should have no right to legally determine the outcome---they, lack the ability to fully empathize, or rather, fully identify, with women in this biological fate--and the socially determined legal fate that only women have to live.
I lived and worked in Ireland for a year 30 years ago with my family, and knew one of the leaders of the pro-choice movement. She and other leaders hoped for a chance to change their constitution much earlier than this, but perhaps the passage of time may allow a full repeal victory, and so doing, enhance liberty for half of all of us, which, I believe, also improves it for all.
72
While I am a Democrat and generally in favor of abortion rights, it gets me crazy when I read things like "“The mind boggles at how you seek to uphold a system where women are not allowed to make choices for themselves”, implying that there is only one human being involved and the state has no role in this process. Pregnancy evolves from one person, just before the moment of conception, to two people, the latter being most obvious the moment before birth. And while this is a continuum, more or less, there is clearly a role for the state at certain times during this process, just as there is in protecting children from harm by their parents. The Roe v. Wade decision recognizes this and attempts to deal with it by dividing pregnancies into trimesters with each trimester treated differently with respect to abortion. This is wise policy. I'm simply saying that people should recognize that pregnancy is a gradual evolution from one person to two people and that therefore talking about abortion rights in terms of the rights of one person is simply wrong and weakens the position they favor.
17
Pregnancy evolves from two people to three, but until recently we lacked any reliable way to make sure that both would be responsible for creating the third. Now, a library of male DNA would enable us to determine both parties with certainty, and put an end to the ability of males to get away with stuff. Males could be made at least financially responsible, and would run the risk of having to face their adult or adolescent children and explain themselves.
This loss of privacy and freedom for men would fundamentally alter the dynamics between the sexes. If Ireland wants to keep abortions illegal, making men unable to avoid their responsibility should go with it. But men will fight to limit the freedom of women while preserving their own, so this will not happen.
40
The state should not be involved in women’s reproduction at any point. Period. The decision to go to term belongs to the mother, up to the level of advise she wishes to accept from her OB-Gyn. Anything less demotes women to second class status.
5
I totally disagree that a fetus in my uterus is a human person. Until some time after birth, it has no more self-awareness than a vegetable. Human beings have rights by virtue of their unique capacity for self-awareness rather than through having more or less the same DNA as any other primate. But let’s say that you recognize a fetus as a human person. Fine; but I don’t want this person inside my body. Every legal system that I know of recognizes the right to self-defense to the point of killing the attacker. If I can kill a rapist who will only occupy my body for minutes, why shouldn’t I kill an entity that will occupy it for nine months against my will? You will say that a fetus is innocent because it cannot have intentions. In other words, you recognize it is not a human person. Sorry but you can’t have it both ways.
4
The way I look at the issue of choice and abortion is simple. What right does anyone have to legislate how individuals live. Repealing the 8th Amendment will not change the choices people make nor should women be burdened with sacrificing her body and mind until men learn it’s a two way street.
19
What these pro life, anti abortion advocates don't understand or don't choose to understand is that abortions cannot be stopped. Women have been seeking help in all the ways possible (many of them unsafe) since the beginning of time and the earliest records of birth issues and problems.
Efforts of the anti group only increase pain and suffering for mothers of the babies (and the rest of their families) that they think they are protecting.
64
They are not "Pro Life" they are pro birth. Their concerns, at least in this country, end the instant that child takes it's first breath.
11
Sounds like the NRA, just substituting abortion for gun proliferation.
1
Abby Alcott, mother of Louisa May, helped immigrant women from Ireland with their extraordinarily large families (and some say Abby's third daughter - "Beth" - died from scarlet fever she caught from working alongside her mother in assisting with sick/infected families from Ireland).
When a woman was having her 16th, 17th, 18th or 20th child, she was clearly not in control of her life, of her time in this world. At some point, under those conditions, it becomes a "blessing" to die in childbirth (it almost happened to me - not a bad way to go, slowly drifting off from a tremendous loss of blood). It seems modern Irish women are happy to plan their parenthood, having a mere 4 children (a la Maria Steen). What is the difference between preventing a soul from coming here and preventing a soul from coming here?
29
Women are being offered in sacrifice to their unborn embryos and fetuses, treated as slaves to an unborn fetus. Women are considered worth less than an embryo by these men who labor under the false idea that they have the right to tell women what they can and cannot do. Women who are complicit with that vile handing over of power are agreeing that they are just vessels, nothing more.
When we all get to decide whether men have the right to have their faulty hearts or prostates treated so that they can artificially prolong their lives or when only women get to decide what medical care men can have or when only women get to force men to raise each child born and for the ensuing decades get more and more children added to their burden and when we forbid men to use condoms so that each baby born falls into that category of theirs and theirs alone to raise - then there might be the beginnings of parity. A woman's medical care, including pregnancy, is nobody's business but hers (and those she designates).
7
As a pro life woman and of Irish heritage, I have been watching the pro life debate with much interest. I do hope the Irish people do the right thing and keep abortion illegal in Ireland for the sake of babies and mothers.
I have been reading about this on the Internet and on television and there has been strong support for supporting the pro-life stand. EWTN has been reporting about the many pro-life marches and thousands upon thousands who have taken to the streets to show their solidarity. I have been so proud of these Irish people for being so vocal in their support. It proves that they value the life of the unborn. They have been relentless and will not give up this very important fight.
I am praying that these pro lifers win and I wish I was able to travel to Ireland to show my support. I want to thank the many wonderful Irish people for not remaining silent and speaking out against the evils of abortion. My Irish relatives who were wonderful people would be so proud of the residents of this beautiful country for taking this stand. It also makes me proud to say I am an Irish American. Good luck with the no vote to keep abortion out of Ireland. I will be with you in spirit on Friday when you vote no.
5
This descendent of Irish-Americans would like to praise the pro-choice Irish women and men who are fighting for every woman to have the right to control her own body. I am pregnant right now, with a much desired pregnancy, yet I believe strongly in my and every women's right to decide if, when, and how she has a child. Women are not really free if a chance sexual encounter or rape could sentence them to life long health impairment. Pregnancy is extremely risky and it must be a choice, not forced upon us. Abortion and birth control are women's freedom and I applaud and join my Irish kin in fighting for the freedom of women.
92
The excess Irish population is still coming here, and are the right color and speak the right language to still be admitted.
Anti-Irish prejudice is our oldest such prejudice (prejudice against native Americans who were already here and those who were brought here as slaves has a different structure) and has largely been displaced by prejudice against other ethnicities.
If the excess Irish population had no place to go (which is the case for the earth as a whole), the debate in Ireland would be different because the natural consequence of large families would be painfully clear.
17
This is a very odd comment. Ireland’s fertility rate of around 1.9 is similar to France and some other developed countries. As an economy reaching full employment, there is a large multinational workforce. If the reference is to mass emigration due to the Famine, abortion policies had nothing to do with a failure of the staple crop and the distress this caused to a population which were dispossessed in their own country and had no access to the agricultural bounty that was still being exported. If the argument is that abortion is some form of Malthusian response to population growth, then this is not a woman’s choice issue but something rather sinister.
4
Part of the reason I'm not a catholic anymore is this abortion issue, which is the subject of a referendum in Ireland. As a catholic I had to be opposed to abortion(along with many other things). This was a requirement and still is among catholics.
It's time to bring the issue to rest by allowing abortion universally so that woman can have them safely. If the Church says I can't believe that, so much for the Church. Note that the Church also prohibits contraceptives. I don't think the Church ought to change it's stance because it really cannot do that and still maintain its integrity. However, society has outgrown the morality of the Church, at least respecting abortion, contraception and sexuality generally.
88
It is of endless fascination - and horror and loathing - to me that this same "Catholic Church" has so much love and concern for children, as long as they are in the wombs of women, a human category they detest and prefer to hold as chattel, while abusing children for generations around the world - and doing all within their considerable power to deceive, hide, move about to continue the crimes, against those same children they want to force the hated women to bear. It is ages past time to call them what they are: a cult of oppression and criminal abuse of women and children - and their noses and power in the politics and policies that affect LIVES is unwanted and out of bounds and none of the g.d. business!
3
If society has outgrown the killing of an unborn child we are all in trouble, not just the Church.
2
If one can’t see that it’s reasonable to have moral reservations about abortion, then there really no hope for compromise on other issues.
16
There’s a huge difference between moral reservations (personal) and state sanctions. Personal religious beliefs cannot and should not impose on citizens who do not share those beliefs.
98
Are you equating having moral reservations with supporting an abortion ban? Many people have moral reservations about abortion, but believe women have the right to choose for themselves according to their own moral and religious frameworks. In short, moral reservations about abortion exists together with legal abortion. If you have moral reservations, you can offer alternatives (adoption services; pregnancy, birth, and newborn support; promoting the use and availability of birth control). What you should not do is impose your reservations on others as a prohibition. That is being uncompromising.
47
Fine. Have your moral reservations. Nobody likes abortion, but there should be legal recourse for women in the early stage of pregnancy.
It is immoral to drive women from their homes and nation to get reasonable healthcare when it is about their own bodies. Men and female religious zealots should not have jurisdiction over women's bodies. Period.
6
When abortion is legal, a woman who needs an abortion, will have a legal one. When abortion is illegal, a woman who needs an abortion will have an illegal one. At age 71 I've been around long enough to have seen it both ways. And I can say with certainty, legal is better.
670
As another 71 year old woman - I am with you 100%. Everything you said is common sense and also completely true.
I never see those who are against abortion, offering to raise the child of one who wishes to have an abortion but cannot do so. Nor do they offer to support unwed mothers during their pregnancies. One just hears a lot of judgmental malarky.
I at one time I contemplated an abortion. It could have been legal because I had a friend whose mother was a psychiatrist and would have made it a necessity. I did not have it and I am glad . . . . . . but it must be a choice for all women.
108
When I was a sophomore in high school (1960) a classmate had an abortion...she was 14. She died of sepsis. Irony of ironies, her father was a prominent doctor in the community. As long as I live I'll never forget seeing her laid out in her coffin at the funeral home. She was so beautiful, so young and so very dead.
59
You have the likes of Catholic Paul Ryan who gets fairly giddy over the opportunity to end all kinds of help for people in any kind of need, whether it's elderly, disabled, poor, or any other troubles. The only thing they want to force is for women to bear children, no matter what. I suggest that all pregnant women sue Paul Ryan for child support, sue the local priest for child support, sue the Catholic church for child support, etc.
Mary McAleese, a former president of Ireland, was speaking in Rome ahead of the Voices of Faith conference this year, which features prominent Catholic women from around the world. She said "The Catholic Church is one of the last great bastions of misogyny," it's an empire of misogyny.
The cruelty of the Catholic church towards women has existed for a millennia, and it's long past time for the silk-clad and silk-slippered priests of the church to stand down from their barbaric position on abortion.
Ireland has clung to the cruel and out-dated position of the Catholic Church that a "woman's place" should be as a meek and obedient inferior to her husband. That a large body of powerful men should take it upon themselves to rule on what is appropriate for a woman to do with her own body is simply a demonstration of "force majeure" from a body of men generally ignorant of the subject.
263
We are taking about a referendum where women and men will vote. Surely this is the popular will?
Add to your wonderful, but tragic, comment the possibility that the Catholic Church is so much against family planning, birth control, abortion, and the rights of women so that more Catholics are born so that more priests and the rest of their very wealth hierarchy have an endless supply of financial support, of mindless worshippers and obedient servants, and children to be abused by a cult, not only of misogyny, but of pedophiles.
In addition, I am sick of well-deserved loathing for the Catholic church being labeled as "bigotry" as if all should consider "the church" to be sacrosanct and beyond calling it what it is: an oppressive, self-serving, hypocritical cult.
13
And how long, J Murphy, did it take to get to that? Aside from which, human rights are not even protected by majority votes in many cases--though certainly more that way than by all-male religious dictates, it's clear enough.
4
Religiously-based laws such as anti-abortion primarily have an impact on poor women, the world over. Those with financial means find a way to obtain the needed medical services, but poor women are stuck. Now Trump wants to make the problem even worse in the United States.
163
Trump wants poor women and their babies to be
malnourished as well by taking away their
food stamps.
11
My mother was a first-generation Irish Catholic, and as anti-abortion as they come. But at the same time, she was very kind to the needy, poor and unfortunate. I could never understand why she couldn't see the cruelty of forcing a young girl who was impregnated through incest or rape to bear that child. Or forcing any woman to bear a child she does not want or can't not take care of. The cruelty extends not just to the girl or the woman, but also to the child she is forced to bear. No society can call itself free if the state controls the reproductive freedom of half its population.
Abortion has always been and will always be a choice available to the rich.
340
Reply to Lily
You are right. I don't understand the rampant cruelty against women either.
And no society can call itself "pro-life" if it has no compassion for the life of the mothers.
130
If I remember correctly, that was one of Margaret Sanger's main points. The rich in the 19th century were taking their daughters to "pregnancy consultant" on the quiet while the poor either had 12 plus pregnancies, went to jail, or died. I remember in the fight for Roe vs. Wade, one of the main arguments was that the laws don't stop abortion, they just make it deadly.
46
I have always thought that "anti-choice" is a more accurate description than "pro-life."
1
Maureen -
But through out this piece, you never address the moral dilemma of killing the unborn. That is what abortion is.
My wife and I had at 12-weeks the discovery she was carrying a Trisomy-13 baby that was dying since conception. That is very different from a healthy-will-come-to-term baby.
Why do you ignore the baby's right to exist and focus only on women being forced to carry to term? That lacks balance, just as ignoring women's rights does too. My wife forced us, right or wrong, to have an abortion of Caitlin. As the father, I had NO rights. The baby had NO rights. Only my wife decided. Is that completely right. I doubt so. There were three people involved, and not two people and "a fetus". Three people.
Scream as loud as you like, Our Bodies -- but there were three people involved in that situation, and only one with "rights". That is wrong and unjust. Hence, why all the umbrage.
19
No one ever said such decisions are easy, but women bear the unique burden of nurturing and bearing children WITHIN their bodies. No parsing of conflicting rights can erase that fact.
54
Sorry, I think you are confused. No baby can have a right to exist until it does exist. An embryo, the sort that is expelled in an early abortion, is no baby. A fetus is not a baby. That's one reason we have technical terms for them.
I assume you are consistent in your position and therefore adamantly opposed to contraception, which according to you is another way to interfere with a "baby's right to exist". In fact, any method of having fewer than the maximum number of babies is inconsistent with a "baby's right to exist". That is an unsupportable extreme. Otherwise, you are contradicting yourself.
27
I think that's a red herring assertion.
It seems strange to me that people haven't generally recognized that there are too many people on this planet. The greatest driver of our impending climate disaster is the growth in human population. So why demand an unwilling woman to carry another baby to term, only to deny any security thereafter?
111
This column evokes arguments eerily similar to arguments against gun control. There is the idea that we cannot regulate individual choices, that the killing simply must go on and to restrict the tools of death is an unconscionable infringement on autonomy and liberty.
We should be honest. To preserve the life of the vulnerable requires a restriction on the autonomy of the strong. The vulnerable need to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and protected. We are kidding ourselves if we think that this demands nothing of us.
How many people are walking around today in Ireland who were at one time an unplanned and unwanted child in the womb? How many are alive today because of a threatened law, and a culture reinforced by that law, that placed their convenient execution off the table of consideration?
6
The right and responsibility to maintain control over one's own body is not in any way similar to the rights claimed by gun owners to own, carry, and/or display guns anywhere, anytime, any place. Fact is, in most states, abortion is more tightly regulated than gun ownership.
57
And how many women are dead due to having illegal abortions? Why do those women never count? How many women died in Ireland becuase the medical care they needed to survive conflicted with the needs of their fetus? Why do they not matter?
14
To preserve the lives of vulnerable people suffering kidney failure, would you support the forced surgical removal of one of your kidneys?
5
The thought comes to my mind as trump always had multiple partners and as we are told by several of them that he never used any sort of protection !
What he gotten some pregnant and then what would be the mystery ?
30
That’s one scenario. Or, perhaps there’s an unacknowledged child out there, a la Arnold Schwarzenegger.
2
From Where I Sit , you just got it.
Also trumps intense jealousy to ward our very popular President Barack Obama will be his ultimate downfall.
History is plenty of examples where religion seeking to control human behavior evolves into a dystopia for those who want to decide for themselves. Free-choice is *NOT* pro-abortion, it is the right to decide what's right for oneself by oneself.
How the two aberrant cases described here can be justified in the name of God? How many more of these sacrifices God will demand to save our souls?
39
One would have hoped that by this time in history, we would have made reproductive education a priority and limited abortions as best we could through easy availability of birth control. Religious fanaticism and an uninformed electorate have made even that simple step unconscionably difficult.
For those with unwanted pregnancy, it can only be the choice of the pregnant woman as to whether she wishes to continue through to term.
I believe that those who superciliously condemn the choices of others in these 'hard' cases would keep their mouths shut tightly if the simple remedy available was to immediately transfer the unwanted pregnancy and lifetime responsibility to the moral scold.
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I was adopted. My birth father was a Catholic priest and my mother was seeing him for "therapy". For 6 years. They became intimate and I was born a year later. Yes, I am glad to be here. I have had a fantastic life. But she should have had a choice. Much of life is completely random. Let's just deal with that. No one should dictate what women do with their bodies.
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My paternal grandmother was Flynn. My maternal grandmother was a MacClure.
I’m very proud of my Irish heritage but like James Joyce I hate certain things about the Catholic Church’s role in Irish life.
It’s tragically outrageous that the quality of mind that brought us the Inquisition is even considered to be a legitimate voice in the debate over a woman’s right to choose her own reproductive destiny.
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I for one have heard enough about "Irish" heritage. We're all citizens of the the world....love one another.
"“The mind boggles at how you seek to uphold a system where women are not allowed to make choices for themselves.”"
Hmm ... yes, the mind does boggle ...
The moral standing of abortion generally is a valid point of debate, though it is probably best that voters opt for some form of abortion access rather than the seemingly draconian present law.
However, Una Mullally's comment above is not helpful, including to pro-abortion advocates.
Abortion is surely not a choice only for oneself. The issue is not the humanity of the fetus, but that the irreversible choice is also for it and for the human it is likely to become.
It would seem that in a just and sane society the rights of the mother and those of the conceived but not yet born would be somewhat more equitably balanced than the emphatic and final zero vote on the side of the unborn.
Those who cannot defend themselves are too easily crushed by those who can.
7
Those whose trouble it isn't and will never be are too easily sure of their own rightness.
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Then you would equate the rights of a non viable, undeveloped fetus with those of a woman with a name, a life, responsibilities? Are you aware that doing so requires a woman to sacrifice her life for a fetus? That women in Ireland have died of cancer because they were denied treatment due to pregnancy? That Savita Halappanavar died of sepsis because doctors refused to remove her dying fetus and forced her to bear the stillborn? Why do you discount the mother’s right to life? Why do you ignore her needs, her responsibilities, her humanity? There are no easy choices when a woman faces a problem pregnancy, which is why her decision must be hers and not that of the government.
11
aem: It's obvious you didn't read my post. Where do I discount, where do I ignore? Where do I equate?
I said "more equitably balanced". In what language does that mean "equate"? Equitable does not mean equal.
Abortion supporters do themselves no favors by these kinds of non-responsive absolutist responses that ignore what someone else is saying, or that willfully misunderstand, and that's why they, or should I say we, are where we are. Fighting a losing battle, evidently forever. Thanks.
I get the arguments on both sides. And I get that much of the "no' side is bound by its history whereby the Catholic Church and the state were practically one.
But I'm also struck by the story of Savita, which I remember well for its awfulness. The poor woman wasn't even Irish, or Catholic, and the baby was to be stillborn, beating heart or not, while toxic shock took over her system.
This 8th amendment stuff is a farce. I"m sure that allowing "death of the mother" as a cause for a legal abortion was only added much later and yet, how did that help Savita?
It is about control. While there are parallels between the pro-life crowd here in the US and Ireland in terms of control and shaming the pregnant woman, only one country (us) has a formal firewall between matters of church and state.
The Irish aren't so lucky. Their long history of sexual repression--not absence of sex, mind you, as the Magdalene Sisters so amply proved--only seems aimed at one gender.
The men get off scott free, able to impregnate and still end up a landowner like Maureen's uncle.
It seems to me that the punishment doesn't fit the crime, so to speak, in Ireland. Maybe, just maybe, that will be reversed on Friday.
264
Ireland has DNA tests now too.
Men in the past who got off scot free now find themselves supporting women who bear their children. Smart men protect themselves if they don't want to become parents.
9
The US has DNA tests too and laws that require fathers to pay child support, but we hear and read all too frequently of fathers who don't pay.
1
The best thing about Ireland is that a vote of the people will determine whether abortion is legal. Our rights are OUR choices, and the U.S. Supreme Court erred in its Roe v. Wade decision - setting off the abortion wars here.
Would I vote to legalize abortion? Yes, with some late-term limits.
11
I don't believe in stupid wars, drone killings, the death penalty.
I don't get a say in any of those state-sponsored killings. I mean, I can vote, but I don't have control over these things.
However, I am not Catholic, not religious, so why should someone else tell me what to do with my body. Why should I have to carry a child to term against my will and why should't I have control over my body?
Who are you to decide to tell me when life begins.
Women have had abortions, or "miscarriages" since the beginning of mankind.
Banning them won't stop them and will hurt women.
You don't want to have an abortion, don't have one.
Don't tell me what I can and can't do with my body.
440
"I mean, I can vote, but I don't have control over these things."
That's a contradiction, unless you want to shred our form of government.
2
David Henry:
Voting does not guarantee policy. Voting doesn’t mean your choice wins. Voting doesn’t mean the all the branches of government are acting on your requests. There is no contradiction here at all.
3
"Who are you to decide to tell me when life begins."
Who are you to decide to tell me when life begins?
Life begins at three.
Ireland’s government’s deference to the will of the Roman Catholic Church is exactly what the religious right wants with the government of the U.S. They really consider freedom of conscious contrary to free of religion, which in their eyes is being able to have the government being in conformance with their religious doctrines.
Abortion is a means to an end, to terminate a pregnancy which will result in an unacceptable outcome. Who determines this depends upon whether one relies upon religious beliefs or the consciences of people in consideration of non-religious considerations.
44
The most powerful part of this column is the portion about Maureen's own relatives and neighbors in the 1930s. What a tragic family legacy.
65
The painful lesson once again appears to be that it's terribly tragic when people - and entire civilizations and nation states - get hit over their intellectually defenseless heads with a medieval religious textbook at an early age, it takes centuries or more to recover from the devastating patriarchal brain damage.
We all know that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament and a celebration of virility with drinks for all.
But in the tiny, tiny minds of the men who invented the control drama that is manmade religion, women are to take their submissive, quiet, third-class birthing vessel place and bear all the unwanted male sperm that insecure misogynists have to offer....whether they like it or not...in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Rapist.
The Dark Ages are over... and light won.
It's simply unthinkable to subject women to Christian or Muslim Shariah Law designed and operated by Dark Age male thinkers in the year 2018....it's not quite physical rape, but sure is intellectual rape.
I'm sure the Irish will now finally come to their senses this week about women's rights to control their own bodies and finally let creepy religious men know once and for all to keep their damn hands off other people's body parts.
Let the tragedy of organized religion continue to hoist itself on its own inhumanity.
“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
-- William Butler Yeats
Erin go Bragh !
451
“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
-- William Butler Yeats
A fine quote Soc. Many Catholics and all Evangelicals on the Christian side still live in middle ages. Their pathology creates misery for miseries sake.
27
Love your comment that if men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament.
18
I agree with you except for a factual
error in your otherwise excellent post
Remnants of the Dark Age persist with great influence, more so in the past year.
The ship of state is sinking.
16
When any country perpetuates a cruel and outdated law, it's usually religion that is behind it: Public beheadings in Saudi Arabia. Bombing of infidels in the Middle East. Genital mutilation. Terrorist attacks. In Ireland, controlling women's personal behavior and life decisions.
You don't see those practices in countries where few people go to church, especially in Scandinavia, where all crime rates are far lower than here.
Maybe it's time to revisit our own gestures to God in this country. When I was in school, "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Our Founding Fathers were largely Enlightenment Deists, the atheists of their day, who recognized that church and state must be separated.
Today, in spite of the advance of science, public education has lagged. Otherwise, we would not have a President who feigns Christianity, and a Vice President who believes that the earth began about 7,000 years ago.
Newsflash: There is no Heaven or Hell after we expire. If that's what you want, you can find them both in our lives.
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Mike Roddy, just have to say you wrote a great post! Most people don't know that the founding fathers were Deists and not Bible-thumping Christians. It's funny and tragic at the same time, especially when trying to talk sense to Evangelicals and Creationists.
27
The first Christian president was Andrew Jackson, #7, the hater and killer of Native Americans. (But the important thing is that he has been forgiven and is living blissfully in heaven, right?)
Prior to the modern day era, truth was believed to be known completely and could be transmitted by authoritative sources, and the Church was the source for truth from God. Truth never changed and the explanations for everything had been determined by the great authorities. The misfortunes of life were due to God’s will and how people responded to them would be used to determine their eternal fates on Judgment Day.
That view began to lose it’s veracity with the discovery of the Western Hemisphere and was basically abandoned as unrealistic by the early 18th century when truth was seen to be uncertain and only to be confirmed with very substantial empirical evidence. In addition, the view that man was responsible for a lot that that happened and so could change things for the better came to be believed. It was no longer God who was solely responsible for the bad things suffered by people.
That was three hundred years ago but the pre-modern views still have substantial numbers of believers and many religions founded in pre-modern times continue to oppose public policies based upon modern values and considerations.
41
When the truth is found
To be lies
And all the joy
Within you dies
. . .
1
When anyone is forced to do something against their wishes, is that not called slavery? Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted fetus for nine months, regardless of how the fetus was conceived, is contrary to any notion that all men and women are treating equally. Do the Irish expect the father of the child to then devote nine months of his life carrying for the infant? Of course not.
This is just one more reason why Martin Luther King was correct when he declared that morality cannot be legislated.
89
Did MLK say that? I first heard the phrase in the early 1960s as an argument why integration should not be imposed on the South.
It was really striking to read about your male ancestor who was protected from his involvement in an unwanted pregnancy. The woman, of course, was left 'holding the bag,' and had to go through an experience too devastating for her to recover from.
Men will always have a way out. Women deserve to, also, regardless of whether they have the means to travel, or have connections to a provider willing to buck the rules.
Until safe abortion is legal and readily available, women have a double standard imposed on them.
182
As Clinton once stated, " abortion should be safe, legal, and rare." Allow women to choose what is best for themselves. Don't deny them access to birth control. Accept that some women will choose to have an abortion, always have, and always will. If you don't believe in abortions, great don't have one but stop denying women the right to choose what is best for themselves.
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It should be rare, just as unwanted pregnancy should be rare, because it puts a burden on the body and always carries some risk, although probably less than pregnancy. It would be interesting to know what percentage of pregnancies end in "spontaneous abortion," i.e. miscarriage. God or nature terminates many a pregnancy.
HI Pamela - it should be rare because in a society with citizens who are well-educated regarding their own bodies and who think before taking action, unwanted pregnancies would be rare. Thanks for asking.
As Trump continues to decimate Planned Parenthood, it should be noted that he is not alone doing meddling with a woman’s right to choose. Reagan, Bush41 and 43 also pushed limits but like most things, Trump is worse.
Vote for Democratic women and Democratic men supporting choice in November.
While Ireland is struggling with this important question, at least the U.S. show the world that the people can still cast a consequential vote for justice.
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If Ireland approves the proposed abolition of the ban on abortion, the last major impediment to reunification of the Irish people is gone. Abortion is legal and available in the north of Ireland (in the UK), and would now be in all of that lovely land. Let the women of the nation decide; all men should boycott the election.
45
In fact abortion is only legal in Northern Ireland in very restricted circumstances and in other cases is punishable with life imprisonment. NI has its own theocracy of fundamentalist Christianities, which operate across the sectarian divide. Ironically, when abortion is legalised in the Republic of Ireland (as it will be), women from the north will probably travel here to avail of the service, as a bus from Belfast to Dublin costs just €10. In terms of reunification of the island, don't hold your breath! Brexit will be much more influential than abortion in any case.
22
This is not correct. Abortion is NOT freely available on demand in Northern Ireland and the overwhelming majority of women having abortions travel elsewhere in the UK.
4
Abortion is not legal and available in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has some of the strictest anti abortion laws in Europe despite it being part of the UK
2
Ah, such sadness. I remember watching the movie "The Magdalene Laundry' and not thinking it was fiction. It wasn't until the end, in the post-discussion with women who had been there that I understood that this nightmare had truly happened - and to women not much older than myself. I was profoundly shocked.
If God sends us here with a soul and a plan - with even a zygote having a soul - then perhaps God has sent that zygote/fetus for a reason. Maybe it is beyond our understanding, akin to understanding the mind of God. Perhaps Gods plan is for the woman or a man to be impacted by that pregnancy but the pregnancy is not supposed to come to fruition.
All I know is that women must always have a choice. It is our bodies that are affected. I hope the Irish women can stop being put second behind a zygote and I pray that women in America never lose our right to our own bodies.
66
It is going to take more than prayer..in fact, prayer probably is no substitute for political engagement. Vote. Speak. Support choice in everything you do, including consumer choices and charitable contributions.
53
I agree 100%. Pray wasn't meant to substitute for Vote but I appreciate you making sure that is understood!!
Perhaps things would be better for all woman if god was left out of things, all things. Brings nothing but trouble.
6
What leaves me incredulous, is that a victim of rape who gets caught using those “sketchy pills” available online, to terminate a pregnancy that is not her fault, is apt to get a longer prison sentence than the rapist. How misogynistic is that?
516
Thank you Catholic Church. This is the same bunch that brought us child rape on such a large scale. Funny how they got away with that for so long and are still getting away with it in some places. Funny how they hate both women and children and how strange that so many women fall for their nonsense and lies.
9
I rarely agree with Ms. Dowd, but in this instance I do. While I do not have intimate knowledge of medical education in Ireland, three (3) of the key words in the Hippocratic Oath (Do No Harm) resonated through my mind while I was reading this OP-ED.
43
The Hippocratic Oath is not studied. It is not part of any curriculum. It is merely an historical ceremonial oath, which is no longer taken.
9
It is a shame that the Hippocratic Oath is no longer taken. Thank you for sharing this information with me and readers of The Times.
dmanuta - To take the Hippocratic Oath, the candidate starts out by invoking all the Greek gods and goddesses to be his witness. Probably not what you really want modern healers to do.
These draconian laws are born of religion. Religion punishes you for having sex, it is designed to make you feel guilty and turn to the church for forgiveness.
It ignores scientific knowledge, it forces a woman to do that which she believes is right for her and the unborn child.
These religions freaks do not care about the woman's health or the fate of the child, they just want their religious beliefs enforced on everyone.
Religion denies the scientific facts despite any evidence contrary to its dogma. Worse yet those that can afford it can get an abortion in another country, but Ireland is still the home of backward medieval religion.
Today we are seeing our own courts give primacy to religion despite the constitutional restrictions. It is just plain stupid to enact laws for superstitious beliefs. Believe what you want, but keep it to yourself.
296
The Roman Catholic church has been responsible for more deaths in Ireland than the 800 years of English occupation, the Viking invasions and the Great Hunger combined. Woman in Ireland will never be free until the Irish people free themselves of the Romans as they freed themselves of the English.
18
We must, if necessary, make the obvious First Amendment argument: a minority of religious fanatics, in violation of the Constitution, is imposing their religious values on the American people. They have hijacked the government. This is patently illegal.
8
I believe in a woman's right to choose. And a hard choice it is. To try to justify the killing of a fetus by calling it a "clump of cells" only triviliazes the moral complexity of this choice, and does not invite a deeper understanding and respect for life. And neither does outright denial of the right to choose. Abortion is usually a tragedy for most, it may even be a sin for some in some case, but it should never be a crime.
123
Readers of Patricia's comment here know that a "clump of cells" is a good description of the early stages of embryonic development, when an abortion is easiest.
19
Patricia:
Gemli's 'clump of cells' reference is relevant because it gets to the heart of the debate: Namely, when does a human life begin.
4
Sins do not exist, Patricia. They are the fiction of religion, crafted to induce guilt and suck loyalty and money from the gullible.
8
Excellent article.
I look forward to an equally impassioned article addressing the Trump Administration's decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood clinics that refer patients for abortions.
496
Trump is a hideous, fraudulent embarrassment, not only to our country, but to our species as well.
22
Jeez, I would love some women to come forward with details about their Trump baby abortions. Oh wait, nothing sticks to that guy. Hard to believe it hasn't happened, not with his history.
25
Planned Parenthood by teaching birth control leads to a precipitous reduction in abortions.
27
Easy access to inexpensive birth control, along with education on how to prevent pregancies (and no I don't mean abstinence), is the only proven method of reducing unwanted pregnancies. Ironically the anti-abortion foes are generally against education and access to birth control for women. I've never understood that. Watch it happening here folks, courtesy of Mr. Pence.
608
I understand perfectly well: they are against not only abortion and birth control but also accurate sex education because they are opposed to women--especially poor women and women of color--being able to have sex without consequences. Many of their own lives were altered for the worse by carrying to term an unintended pregnancy, and they resent that other women might get to avoid enduring what they did.
PS--I am the proud and loving mother of a wonderful young man whom my husband & I were willing to move heaven & earth to have (and who was preceded by two blighted ovum miscarriages, one of which would have been his twin had it the genetic material to become a fetus). I believe a baby is God's opinion that the world should go on...a planned and wanted baby, that is.
50
Patriarchal religions want, more than anything, to control women's bodies. That's why the break-down in logic: to reduce unwanted abortions, educate people to use. and make it easy to use, reliable birth control. Science knows how to suppress a pregnancy. But religious 'fathers' don't want women to control their own bodies and so they make reliable birth control methods difficult to access for many, many women. That is wrong and must stop. Women must be allowed to control their own bodies.
99
...and if laws are enacted to deny women that control, they will - as they have in the past - maintain their right to control by breaking those laws.
Agree with all that's written here. It's worth emphasizing the impact of social class and social inequality here: I'm sure higher socioeconomic status women in Ireland are more likely to have the means, savvy, and resources to travel elsewhere for an abortion or to receive the proper medications to terminate a pregnancy. It's the lower-status, less educated women who are most likely to bear the costs of Ireland's draconian policies.
138
As was the case here in the US. And still is in many places, now that so many PP clinics have closed.
54
Yes every thing you have written is true but it is the Republicans/Right to Life who taught use the cost of abortion $1.2M and that is out of the reach of most women. So let none of us pretend that it is life we are arguing about the Republicans have taught us it is the cost.
13
And for hundreds of years it was lower-status, less educated women who backed the church ferociously. Rich people did as well but the church couldn't have got away with it without the poor.
12
In a recent letter to a an anti-abortion friend of mine I wrote that it is the height of intolerance not to allow a woman's right to decide her own reproductive fate.
124
Ireland is a perfect example of the conservative view that life is sacred only when it’s a burden. The more a woman wants or needs an abortion, the more sacred the clump of cells in her womb becomes to the state.
Ironically, the state thinks it’s OK for a child to be born to a woman who is not physically, emotionally or financially able to care for it. As long as it’s a burden, well, everything is just fine.
If Ireland wants to be an example of fundamentalist religious extremism, then the people have my sympathy. Compassion can’t compete. Of course, I suspect that the old sarcastic truism applies to Ireland as much as it does for the U.S.: if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
Hypocrisy abounds, of course. We’ve heard that certain conservative Bible-thumping Republicans have encouraged their paramours to have abortions. Yet in America this creeping fundamentalism is only being held at bay by a single stolen vote on the Supreme Court.
It’s unlikely that abortion could be recriminalized, especially in this time of increasingly vocal women who are not only demanding justice, but who are getting elected in record numbers.
Without women being in positions of power, they’re the playthings of the ageing vulgar hypocrites who know how to inflict pain on them in many ways. Ireland is on the cusp of an upheaval in its politics and its attitudes about the value of life. Will women win, or will a clump of cells prevail?
713
I agree with every point you make. But calling a fetus a "clump of cells" does not strengthen the position that women have the right to make decisions about their own reproductive health.
36
Patricia, gemli did not call a "fetus" a clump of cells. You may notice that the word "fetus" appears nowhere in his comment.
You may know that in the early stages the developing zygote is literally a clump of cells. This is also the best time to carry out an induced abortion.
The consecration of a burdensome child or life-in-process is emblematic of Catholicism's glorification of suffering.
There is nothing noble about avoidable and inadvisable suffering--it is stupidity. And mandating it is cruelty.
Preventing unwanted pregnancies and STDs and de-stigmatizing sex through appropriate education is the focus of several western European nations and is dramatically more effective than what is happening in the US, where unplanned pregnancies, absent fathers and lack of affordable housing and child care are harming children.
But the abortion wars effectively serve the partisan purposes of the Right to polarize the electorate.
The result is a overall decline in the self sufficiency of child rearing households, supposedly a value of the Right. Households headed by white single mothers dominate the lower economic percentiles in Seattle. Absent fathers increasingly work in the cash economy so their income is not seized for child support. Drugs and alcohol further exacerbate child rearing problems.
The K-12 schools are now expected to become substitute parents, detracting from their educational mission.
It all starts with poor sex ed and family planning.
197
If imbecile/moron Trump and Cromwell Pence get their way, abortion will be illegal in America and only the well-off will be able to travel to Canada for a safe abortion.
656
Ha, you remind me that, before Roe, when abortion was legal in New York but not in the rest of the US, we had chartered buses coming from Canada to NY for safe, legal abortions. And women came from all the states in the US, too. Some had tried to induce their own abortions - one, a young woman from Florida had used a paint can opener, an implement I had not known of before.
Let's not go back to those days. Keep it safe and legal despite the Commander's - er, Pence's - desires.
46
Canadian doctors are repeatedly warned not to see elective American patients. Too lawsuit happy so our insurers won't cover us.
You'll have to go further afield.
12
“We may be lost but we’re making good time”......we’ve certainly come a long long way from those “draconian religious” times but where the heck are we ?......saddened to read the comments approving the killing of a baby / fetus / “clump of cells” or whatever term you choose to support your position. Regardless can you agree the mom and baby are deeply wounded when an abortion is performed.
I’ve always liked the Irish, and Ireland can be sensationally beautiful. My one serious kick was during a visit there about six years ago, before the election, when I scoured the countryside and couldn’t find a single O’Bama. I knew that Trump’s “birther” stuff was nonsense as it related to Kenya, but I thought we might be able to pin an Irish birth on Barry. Hawaii, Ireland, what’s the difference? Other than an active volcano.
Yeah. Religion unfettered and empowered to dictate lives can be like cockroaches. Both can’t REALLY physically harm you, but they just ruin anything they happen to fall into.
Feels like 1973 to an American, doesn’t it? Roe v. Wade was a brilliant compromise here – acknowledged and protected the legitimate interests of BOTH the woman AND the state – which can be argued to include the Church in Eire.
They should read up on it. It doesn’t need to be either-or.
35
Mr. Luettgen: The brilliant compromise of Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, but that's a detail.
Roe v. Wade as a national right, even if warranted by the Constitution (which it is not, but neither is the opposite), set abortion rights back by decades, by mobilizing anti-abortion forces to a ferocity that would likely not have been present if abortion rights were being decided state by state.
Think about it also this way: overturning abortion rights, though not equal or present in every state but in many states, and doing so in every state would be impossible, and the likelihood of a non-abortion state becoming an abortion state would be ever-present and real. Eventually, some consensus would likely emerge through the historical practice, of whatever kind, of the most states. You will recall the “crucibles of democracy”, no doubt.
Contrast that with the possibility of a single law, Roe v. Wade, being overturned by five be-robed unelected judges in one fell swoop, for the entire nation, in one day.
Not so brilliant, is it …
---- 8:30 pm
6
Richard Luettgen, you apparently do not like religion from what you posted. Religion is more than just a belief, it is also a tradition. The Irish have struggled for centuries to be included among the nations of the world, and according to belief, have kept in going. Incidentally, Northern Ireland, a legal part of Britain, along with Scotland, Wales and England, has remained the only part of the UK where abortion is illegal. That is one of the few things that Catholics and Protestants agree upon.
2
John Xavier III:
With a name like yours, I'd be afraid of being excommunicated if I hadn't already abandoned the Church eons ago.
I live in a kinda-sorta democracy, and a serious role for religion in any such governance is problematic because democracy is all about arguing and convincing, while it's been long noted how hard it is to argue with God, much less convince Him of anything.
And your state argument is nonsense, the most extreme version of federalism that we fought in part a hideous civil war to put behind us. There are matters of legitimate cultural difference that can appropriately be left to states to determine in their entirety, and then there things that must mark us all as "American". Your solution is as unworkable as the nonsensical "wet-county"/"dry-county" phenomenon, where those who self-righteously live in "dry counties" simply drive over the county line to get lickered-up then kill someone on the highway driving home.
Also, enslavement of women to someone's notion of their proper place depending on whether one lives in Alabama rather than Connecticut strikes me as being quintessentially UN-American.
Just as it was 157 years ago on a different but strangely similar issue, "A house divided against itself cannot stand".
And it's a Republican (like Lincoln) holding these views.
2
Society buff is Ms Dowd
Who knows all the names in the Crowd
Long time Clinton hater
With hate non-abater
The hate lingers long and stays loud.
Now for Irish women set free
From an unwanted pregnancy
With the Clintons offstage
She uncorks her rage
‘Gainst naysayers gloriously.
121
Larry Eisenberg pointedly illuminates the obvious. Maureen dissed President Obama and all but slandered Hillary Clinton, yet gave us many articles about her brother the Trump lover. Now we are in the soup. Thanks Maureen.
4
We don't particularly care about Irish abortions.
Being Americans, we care about American abortions.
The left in Ireland, and the right in the U.S. prefer to talk about "hard cases." (That would be late term abortions here).
The fact is that 90% of abortions are performed in the first trimester. They are performed as a fall back for failure to adequately ensure effective contraception.
There should be no compulsion, but there should be a serious moral consideration as to whether the procedure is the best option. For both mom AND dad. (He has no say as to the menu selections but must pay the tab in either case.)
8
What makes you think that every biological father pays for an abortion?
240
The final decision on getting an abortion, or not, should be made by the one who is pregnant. After all, the person who is pregnant is the one most affected. Perhaps someday, it’ll be possible for men to carry a fetus to term. Meanwhile, it’ll be the woman who is pregnant, and should make the decision.
P.S. : the women I know who had abortions paid for them themselves...
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John M, You write: "The final decision on getting an abortion, or not, should be made by the one who is pregnant." A pregnancy last 9 months. Are you saying that a woman's right to abortion is total, without restrictions, for nine months? The law proposed would limit a woman's access to abortion to three months--with exceptions for when a fetus is unhealthy an unlikely to survive. But if the fetus is healthy, why wait three months? I am for the morning after pill that ends pregnancies just as they are beginning, but three months. On another note, the U.S. Roe v. Wade (1973) was decided by the Supreme Court in order to protect doctors, not women.
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