Celebrating victory for unborn

When Ireland voted en masse this summer to eliminate its constitutional ban on abortion, international media celebrated. The New York Times ran a photo of young Irish women laughing in the most macabre way, joyful and triumphant that they’d finally gotten the right to control not only their own bodies, but the bodies of the children they did not want.

The photo was reproduced in other national papers, and here in our own corner of the world. There were commentaries that praised the courage of an Irish people, and explicit attacks on the Catholic church, which was blamed (no surprise there) for keeping the Celtic ladies in shackles.

The desire to mark the Irish moment as a blow for equality, independence and evolution was shared across the oceans, and those of us who still believe in the dignity of the unborn, the unseen yet real and present child, felt like lepers at a coronation.

I looked high and low for a column that would express my own feelings of nausea, anger, frustration and devastation, and all I found when I Googled the issue were more pictures of feral, feverishly happy women raising their arms in some vile, secular consecration of a new right to kill.

So I wrote my own column about my broken heart, and felt as if I’d said 10 Hail Marys and a proper Act of Contrition.

This week, the scenario was flipped. Argentina, a country as Catholic as Ireland used to be and birthplace of our current pope, refused its own domestic attempt to extend abortion rights. It failed. I waited for the front page stories in the New York Times, searched for photos of women holding babies in their arms and smiles on their faces, and paged through publication after publication in search of some high-profile oped about the glorious reaffirmation of life.

I looked. I Googled. I checked on social media and asked my friends if they’d seen any stories about what had happened on network or cable news.

Aside from a few snippets on pro-life sites, there was a deafening silence about this momentous act of courage on the part of a country that refused to acquiesce in the culture of death.

Sadly, we have entered a time when abortion is only newsworthy when the laws limiting its reach are dissolved by the acid of social narcissism, by the belief that a woman is only accountable to herself, and by the magical thinking that turns a baby into a disposable accessory.

So when the Irish women rose up and stormed the patriarchal castle (or cathedral) with their flaming coat hangers, that became a momentous occasion. It was feted with the same enthusiasm as the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and pointed to as a sign of true enlightenment.

Abortion bumped Guinness, elegiac poetry and shamrocks as the symbol of a New Ireland.

But when Argentina refused to swallow the false secular pieties of feminists and fools, there was silence.

Here and there, a voice spoke out in gratitude, but you had to put your ear to the ground to hear it.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that Argentina disappointed the ladies, angered them, robbed them of their expectations. No elective abortions for the senoritas, no joy across the seas.

I write this to remind myself, and you, how important it is to write at all. If we let society silence our victories, incremental as they might be and vilified by the waves of enlightened folk, we will have lost a powerful weapon: the truth.

The truth is that abortion rights are not universally considered the hallmark of an independent woman.

The truth is that some societies still believe that destroying a child in the womb is murder, regardless of what gentler words we use.

The truth is that there are legions of us out here, some of us under the banner of God and some of us under the arc of science, and some of us with full knowledge that the law should protect the innocent and speak for the voiceless, who do not see ourselves in the stories and photos of celebration when a child is dehumanized.

But we do rejoice when the opposite happens, and life wins even a single precious battle.

Viva Argentina.