Wecandobetter thanabortionon demand
THE Taoiseach Leo Varadkar tells us that the referendum on the Eighth Amendment will be a ‘once-in-a-generation question’.But in truth, it is much more serious than that: because if we vote to strip away all rights from the unborn child, we will never be consulted on this life-and-death issue again.
The choice before us is clear. The Supreme Court says that unborn children have no constitutional rights other than the right to life contained within the Eighth Amendment. If we repeal the Eighth, we will be depriving the unborn of all protection, and handing politicians full control over who gets to live and who does not.
Faced with this, the Government has presented Irish voters with an extreme proposal which will see abortion-on-demand introduced for the first three months of pregnancy. A three-month-old unborn child is not a bunch of cells. He or she is a living, moving and growing person, with limbs formed and with every organ present, with a beating heart, a face, and fingernails.
The overwhelming majority of abortions carried out on such babies are not performed for anything that we would call ‘ hard cases’. Instead of legislating for hard cases the Government has proposed unlimited abortion: the abortion of healthy babies of healthy mothers.
When politicians in the UK voted to legalise abortion, few believed that supposedly restrictive laws would lead to 200,000 abortions taking place annually, but it did.
The Taoiseach tells us that abortion here will be ‘rare’. He can’t possibly believe that. His Government’s proposed abortion law is as unrestricted as Britain’s abortion law, and in Britain one baby is aborted for every four that are born. Whenever unrestricted abortion is introduced, the numbers of terminations skyrockets. This is exactly what happened in the UK, the US, Spain, Canada and many, many other countries over the last 40 years.
There’s no justification for us allowing this to happen in Ireland. We are already one of the top six safest countries in the world for women to give birth in. We are safer than almost every other country in the world with legalised abortion. Those campaigning for a ‘yes’ vote never acknowledge this – but it is a fact.
The Government’s proposals are even more extreme than they initially appear. They allow abortion up to 24 weeks (six months) on vague ‘mental health’ grounds. The ‘mental health’ ground permits abortion on demand in Britain: it accounts for 97% of the total abortions each year. The proposed abortion law even allows abortion up to birth in certain cases, e.g. when the child has a severe disability and when ‘mental health’ is immediately at risk. Minister for Health Simon Harris tries to deflect attention away from this, but his own proposed law contains absolutely no time limits for abortion in two of its sections.
The Government didn’t have to put such an extreme referendum proposal before us, but it did. We can do better than abortion on demand. We can do better for women and babies in crisis pregnancies than by dehumanising the baby and exposing her to chemical and surgical abortions. There is nothing compassionate and caring about that. Real support involves support for both mothers and babies, and it calls for real effort by our elected politicians.
Campaigners for a ‘yes’ vote never acknowledge that every pregnancy also involves a little child. They attempt to hide children before birth from view when they speak and write. But this ignores one half of the reality of pregnancy. They try to claim that our constitutional protection for the unborn, the Eighth Amendment, has no positive effect. But this ignores the independent that it has helped saved tens of thousands of lives over the past 30 years. Our abortion rate is four times lower than Britain’s for example. If that’s not positive, what is? We don’t have the same disregard for babies with disability as Britain has, where 90% of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome in the womb are aborted.
The only way to keep some protection for unborn children and to stop abortion on demand in our GP clinics and our hospitals is to vote ‘No’, and to encourage our family and friends to vote ‘No’ too.
“Whenever unrestricted abortion is introduced, the number of terminations skyrockets”