Wake up and progress towards social justice

I SUPPOSE the usual way for politicians and others to pretend all’s well on their watch is to deny that problems exist, and to vilify those who remind them of them.

For instance, who would be such a curmudgeon as to complain about unemployment, when the figures look so hopeful? Yet being out of work is still dispiriting, and even if you throw all kinds of platitudes at the victims of an economic system that tolerates mass unemployment, unfortunately it still hurts.

All politicians and others ever seemed to know about Ireland is that you couldn’t get an abortion there. Now the referendum result takes away the constitutional protection of the pre-birth child, the result is probably that the policy-makers in this island will know about Ireland nothing at all. The lessons of Irish history remain unlearnt.

Can we not see the consequence of the one-track mind that somehow yokes a desire for social justice with the willingness to impose the pain of a termination on yet more women? The same myopic lack of vision of the socially aware thinker who can’t see past the jobless figures into a society that values all seems to afflict those well-meaning people who haven’t stopped to think what abortion is, and what it does to those involved in it.

Unfortunately, however many times someone glibly repeats a mantra, such as “a woman’s right to choose”, for others, offered little real choice because termination is so expedient for others, it still hurts. Once our politicians wake up to realise this, and how much and how deeply it can hurt, perhaps we can at last make real progress towards a social justice which is just that.

And not some superficial partial substitute, with just a different set of unfortunates exploited and marginalised. Joseph Biddulph Pontypridd