Telling the Truth About Women’s Lives

Abstract

Tell us, they say, about women and abortion in Ireland. OI'm not sure that I can any more, or at least not in any straightforward way. There several reasons for this, personal as much as political. I'm not sure which is the most complicated, and in any case (in my case), the reasons peculiarly resistant to partition. One way and another, I suspect it's to do with the passage of time, the transmutations of generations and, above all, how abortion is framed and dealt with in Ireland. But it's not in Ireland, abortion, that's the whole point. If it were, we wouldn't be here having to write about it. Again. Or think about it, or not much, or not so endlessly. It's Byzantine, this matter of abortion, convoluted, complex beyond all reason and necessity, harrowing, tortuous. Also often wounding, and sometimes bizarre. (1) As I'm writing this, keeping an ear to the ground as ever, I hear a bishop speak. He says, inter alia, that lesbians and gay men who have children may be care-givers, but they are not necessarily parents. When asked about his views on a woman having an abortion after she has been raped, the bishop says women who become pregnant through rape should not destroy a life in order to get back at the rapist. (2) That these models of logic aroused more amusement and caustic comment than ire and offence is a sign of the rapid and steep decline of the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland over the past 20 years. The bishop's intervention in a secular debate is seen as contentious and out of step with contemporary morality and behaviour. It is counter-cultural. Irish people no longer cowed or obsequious in the face of episcopal intimidation. And we're certainly not obedient. Mostly, we don't believe the bishop, and definitely we don't do what the bishop says. To be fair (although I'm under no obligation, given our history of subjugation by the Catholic clergy), the next day, other bishops and priests rushed quasi en masse to dissociate themselves from the bishop's remarks, and he had to apologise for any hurt he 'may' have caused, which is more of a damage limitation exercise than an apology. Mind you (I'm still being fair), it wasn't the abortion remarks the hastening clergy were repudiating, only the comments on the parenting suitability of lesbians and gay men, considered as potentially damaging to the Catholic Church in light of the marriage equality referendum to be held in May. So a strategic partial repudiation then. Nothing to do with truth. All the same, it's a change that changes so much, after generations of feminism, we know a lot more now about the truths of women's lives, and we're talking about them, not sub rosa and entre nous, but out loud and in public. I grew up knowing nothing. No one ever told me the 'facts of life ', and I'm not sure when I even knew there were facts I didn 't know. Until quite a ripe age, sex and reproduction remained largely a mystery for me. In my convent school when I was about fourteen or fifteen, a nun told us, in all seriousness, that if we met boys (and we did, of course we did), we should keep our berets and gloves on all the time. For me, and for so many women of my generation and generations before me, you had to learn on the job. Trial and error. The consequences of the errors were always left to us, the women, to bear. These were the wages of sin, because sex (outside marriage) and sin were synonymous. Hence the Magdalen laundries, followed, in so many cases, by the lonely boat to England and life-long damage. As a young woman, I was lucky not to get pregnant. It wasn 't because I was well-informed and well equipped--or practicing chastity. Au contraire. I was just lucky, that's all. The silence surrounding abortion in this country has been deafening, only punctuated every decade or so by a dreadful human tragedy - the loss of a woman's life or the awful public drama of court cases taken to wrest from the State the right to access abortion here, where we live. …