Pregnancy, birth and bringing up a small child aren’t easy, even in the best of circumstances when you have support from a partner and/or family and friends. I’ve been fortunate to have always had someone sticking by me. The first time I gave birth, I had a well-paid job to return to, but it was still tough.

Having a child is a sea change in a woman’s life. It affects her physically, mentally and I believe, also, spiritually. I went from only thinking about myself to always thinking about them, and now am at the point of recognising that one of the people I also need to look after is myself (forgotten sometimes in the avalanche of requests).

In the past women, were only valued as wives and mothers. Nowadays, when it comes to work, women can play on the same field as men, but things are by no means equal. As I’ve found out through personal experience, if you have a child, attitudes change. You might be seen as a shirker or someone who’s voluntarily jumped off the career rat-race. In my case, it meant losing any chance of promotion and a permanent position.

I want to talk about the abortion referendum in Ireland, and I feel it’s important to start from a point of empathy and compassion. Without having walked her walk or been in her shoes, I can’t judge any woman who’s felt unable to continue with a pregnancy. Given the same situation, would I have made her choices? I’ll never know.

So what I say is directed, not at individuals, but at the Yes campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment in the Irish Constitution. The Eighth Amendment protected the unborn child by giving equal rights to both. Until now, abortion was only available in Ireland in very limited circumstances, such as if the mother’s life was at risk (including by suicide).

The campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment

In the last few months and weeks, my Facebook feed was flooded with links to newspaper articles about the referendum. From the ‘Yes’ side came heart-breaking stories about women whose child died in the womb and were not given the option of inducing a miscarriage until the body expelled it naturally. I read about mothers whose baby had a fatal foetal abnormality, but weren’t given the option of terminating the pregnancy in Ireland.

The gist of the articles and messages was, vote Yes to give women access to proper medical care. Who wouldn’t want to vote ‘Yes’ if it meant better healthcare for women? For a long time, I was genuinely confused. Was the repeal all about making provision for women whose unborn babies had died in the womb? If so, I had a lot of sympathy.

Only recently, I realised that the ‘Yes’ vote was about making abortion available to everyone, on demand, in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. There was very little acknowledgement of this in the Facebook shares from my ‘Yes’ friends. The emphasis seemed to be about helping people in tragic circumstances.

In the last week or two, however , the tone of the shared messages changed and became quite aggressive: our bodies our choices, think of the suffering women have to go through with an unwanted pregnancy.

I imagined all these women, shut up and silent for too long, now almost literally screaming through facebook shares and posters and protests. They were shouting so hard that it was hard to hear anything else. Their message almost put the moral burden on people to vote ‘Yes’. If they weren’t, they were going to let women down, oppress them, leave the country in darkness etc.

My reaction to the campaign

I tried not to have a knee-jerk reaction, ‘I’m Catholic, so I think abortion is wrong.’ I really tried to understand the others’ point of view, particularly that of women who feel, for whatever reason, that their pregnancy is an unbearable burden.

What bothered me about the ‘Yes’ campaign is that there was little or no recognition of the fact that a life would be lost. In the debate about women’s rights over their own bodies, they didn’t acknowledge the fact that an unborn baby would die.

The women were shouting, and the unborn babies were silent.

The thing which upset me most about the ‘Yes’ campaign was that it didn’t even weigh up the rights of the baby against the rights of the mother. It was silent on this, as if an unborn child had no rights at all.

When the ‘Yes’ vote won last week, my ‘Yes’ friends put up self-congratulatory posts and talked about going out to celebrate with champagne. In Dublin, people were partying in the streets.

There should have been no partying on this one. Even if they felt that the mothers’ rights weighed heavier than those of her unborn child, there should have been an acknowledgement that at the heart of every decision to terminate a pregnancy, is a tragedy, both for the mother and the child which dies.

No value?

It’s not acceptable to euthanise an old person when they can no longer look after themselves, or even to abandon your dog or cat if you feel it is a burden. However, it seems that we have reached a point, where it is perfectly acceptable to kill an unborn baby. Perhaps this is because we can’t see or hear it’s suffering. By its very nature it is silent.

Articles like Vonny Moyes writing in the Scottish newspaper, The National, celebrate the fact that since the Irish campaign, women no longer even have to show regret over an abortion (Vonny Moyes writes brave articles on health, parenthood and womens’ rights, but I have to disagree with her on this one). It seems that secular society is moving towards a consensus that the unborn have no rights and no value.

God works in silence, through the small, the weak and the powerless. Today we have the feast of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary to Elizabeth where she says in the Magnificat, ‘He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.’ What if God sees things differently? What if every human life has value no matter how small, weak, old or sick?

What does it take to choose life?

To choose to protect an unborn life, whether that’s through the law or in a decision to continue a pregnancy, you need both belief and faith.

The first is belief that the unborn child has value, in and of itself, despite the fact that it is completely dependant on the mother’s body for survival.

The Catholic Church has been described as ‘holding out’ on the issue of abortion, as if everyone else has moved on. However, I’m glad the church is standing firm. Sometimes, when I’ve gone to church feeling troubled, I’ve had a strong feeling that I’ve entered a refuge. The church has been described as the barque of Peter or an ark. Would I feel safe, if the church didn’t defend the rights of the voiceless? As an unemployed mother with a sick child, I’m in a vulnerable position. Would I feel valued if the church said that it was okay to end a defenceless life?

Secondly, you need faith to open yourself to the possibility of pregnancy, accept the changes in your body, give birth, tend for a tiny, helpless human being, bring up a child. You have to have faith that what you’re doing is valuable and that you’ll get the help you need at each stage.

I don’t know what it is to experience an unwanted pregnancy. However, I do know what it is to have a child with an illness that no-one expected or planned for, and which meant huge changes to my own life and that of the whole family, including having to stop work and even facing difficulties over finding living accommodation when she was in hospital. I know what it is to feel unsupported, and totally out of my depth or so worn down that I can hardly face the next hour or the next day. Faith helped me to keep going even if it didn’t always make me feel better.

Many women facing unwanted pregnancies, may not have religious faith. However, faith and belief can also come from other places: from a supportive family where children are celebrated as a gift. It should, of course, also come from society, but we have a long way to go. I could say a lot about the way single mothers are ostracised and women side-lined at work after having a child, but I’ll leave that for another post. All I’ll say, is that if we want women to choose life for the unborn, we have to do a lot more to support and value mothers.

I’ll end with a link to a profound article from the ‘No’ side of the Irish campaign where a woman talks about her experience of having an abortion.