Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Everyone should have the right to own their choices
Well out of poll position
THE result in last Thursday’s by-election in Tiverton and Honiton was so bad Tory candidate, Helen Hurford, locked herself in a room at the count centre and wouldn’t speak to the media.
In fairness, a swing of 30,000 votes against your party can hardly be much fun.
All I can say is if she had half the brass neck of her party boss, Boris
Johnson, she would have come out claiming the result was only “a minor setback”. And that she had “heard what the electorate was saying’ and that she would be back ‘bigger and better” next time.
Unlike Mrs Hurford, we all know only too well that Boris is absolutely shameless.
He’ll spew out bull **** and downright lies all day long.
FOR around 20 years I regularly took part on a local radio programme every Friday morning where we reviewed the big issues of the week.
It was a call-in type show and the audience response could be very mixed.
One week it would be full-on audience participation, the next it seemed we were in a silo talking to ourselves.
But we all knew there was one topic that could get the studio switchboard glowing red – abortion. And on a couple of occasions, when reactions were clearly dragging along the floor, just to stir things up, we brought the subject up. It worked every time.
The most rabid wee Orangeman and the biggest altar hugging Catholic, who would be totally estranged on just about everything else, suddenly had common cause. And you could get it with both barrels from them for not being sufficiently on their pro-life”side.
Of course, the pro-choice side were no shrinking violets either.
The argument here usually ran along the line that no man should have a say on the subject of abortion, that it was a woman’s body and only she had the right to make the decision.
I considered myself most definitely pro-life but I also considered myself pro-choice and that nuanced position wasn’t absolutist enough for those claiming the moral high ground so I was Johnny no-mates.
The best way I can explain my pro-life/ pro-choice stance is to repeat a conversation I had on this very subject with a very wise man I knew back in the day.
For the purposes of this article we’ll call him Fr Brendan.
Me: “Look Fr Brendan, I don’t have a 14-year-old daughter – but if I did, and she got raped, got pregnant and I watched her go into deep depression, become suicidal or whatever and then she came to me and said she wanted an abortion what advice would you give me?” Fr Brendan: “I would say, do what is right for your family. And may God go with you.”
Last Friday in what was the biggest decision made by an American court in almost 50 years their Supreme Court decided to rescind Roe v Wade which was the legal precedent which provided women the right to have an abortion. It seemed to me many of those American politicians leading the prolife campaign and shouting loudest about the sanctity of human life not only support the death penalty. But they have refused – on numerous occasions – to support any kind of curtailment of gun control laws. That’s pro-life? The decision has divided America right down the middle, and it was reignited the debate here big time.
Over the weekend anyone participating in social media could hardly have missed the heated arguments. Polar viewpoints ranged from one woman saying abortion was wrong “in each and every circumstance” – including rape, incest, fatal foetal abnormality etc. To another person suggesting that if every time men had sex they risked the “possibility of death, life altering interruption to their careers and education, and the sudden life-long responsibility for another being” she was pretty certain they’d expect to have a choice in the matter. Like “Fr Brendan” so wisely said all those years ago, when it comes to issues of morality – abortion, contraception, divorce whatever – we all should have the right to our own decisions and to live with the consequences.