Had the Reproductive Rights (Amendment) Bill 2026 passed last week it would have removed the three-day wait for women seeking an abortion in this country. Thankfully, only 30 TDs voted in favour, 85 against and 36 abstained.
Like the Referendum of 2024, it was assumed that pushing further on abortion would be unquestioningly seen as a good thing because………well, progress is good, right? This is the vapid theoretical framework of the New Nihilistic Left. Whereas the old left fought for rights or equality and, once they were granted, the work was complete. The new hard left again and again takes a position reached by reasoned argument and painful consensus and push it off the edge of the cliff.
We in Ireland have the unique perspective in our lifetime of seeing abortion illegal, then legal, then normalised, now celebrated. The latter trend I’ve dubbed the cool-girl branding of abortion, and it is horrifying. There is a much-copied clip on Instagram of a woman in a nightclub with a house music soundtrack and the caption “Letting my baby hear my favourite DJ before I abort it.” Or, Lily Allen giggling and singing “abortions, I had a few, four of five I can’t remember.” to the tune of “I did it my way” on her podcast. The American screenwriter Lena Dunham claiming she wishes she had had an abortion. One of the scenes she wrote shows a woman resisting her boyfriend’s amorous advances because she just aborted his baby without telling him.
Abortion is not good for women. Abortion is not good for society. Abortion is the taking of a human life”
This is propaganda and it is working. It is everywhere in the culture, it the necessary pyschops to desensitise young women in order to implement the UN view of abortion as healthcare. But abortion is not care or healthcare. Abortion is not good for women. Abortion is not good for society. Abortion is the taking of a human life. If you are pro-life this is never justified.
Justified
Historically, if you were pro-choice, it was occasionally justified. It was strictly on those terms the Irish people voted for abortion to be safe, legal, and rare. The fact that one in six pregnancies now ends in abortion is indicative of its use as contraceptive. As abortion is a bad thing, then more cannot be a good thing. Holly Cairns brought forward this bill for political gain and would have been well aware that more abortions would take place if the three-day wait was dropped. That is clearly what the left wants.
Abortion as contraceptive enables hook-up culture, which is harmful to society but particularly young women. It forces the responsibility for its inevitable outcome solely onto women to shoulder and to live with, for life. In order to effect this, first abortion had to be rebranded as liberation. In the same way, leaving your infant child with a stranger so you can work a 12-hour day was. Neither of these things are ‘feminism’, because neither is good for women.
The pill, then abortion, can be viewed as proto-transhumanist technologies. The equality they purported to offer was a lie”
The defeat in the Dáil was a landmark moment, such that it is hard to overstate its significance. For the second time now, a line was drawn in the sand. No pasarán. The progressives assumed that the public would unquestioningly collapse the meaning of mothering or the family in the Constitution or that the politicians would remove the ability of a woman to get the support she needs, change her mind or recover from the shock of a crisis pregnancy. Both stood firm in line with our values.
The pill, then abortion, can be viewed as proto-transhumanist technologies. The equality they purported to offer was a lie. Because once the pill was invented, the meaning of sex was changed forever in the culture; It went from an act with the serious, life-changing consequences of pregnancy acknowledged by the ringfencing of sex within marriage. After the pill, women no longer had any apparent reason to avoid pre-marital sex as part of the so-called sexual revolution, and abortion was the inevitable conclusion of this technology.
Veneration
As a Catholic and a feminist, I find the veneration of Motherhood and Motherlove in Mary empowering and enriching. As a mother of three children who made it earthside and three who did not, I can say that motherhood has been the making of me. It was the single biggest tool of self-actualisation along with marraige to my husband of 23 years. It gave me that steel inside, without which, I doubt I would have become a campaigner on issues like trans, immigration, surrogacy, reform of the family courts, or the Constitutional definitions of mothers and families.
I recently spoke at the Danube Institute on Family Formation in Budapest. I pointed out that our non-replacement birthrate of 1.47 was almost 4 as recently as the late 70s. The sharp decline is due to both culture and economics. Whilst the fetishisation of perfect motherhood is rife on social media paradoxically, young women are told their lives and careers will be over.
We need to change the messaging to say there is no perfect time and good enough parenting is good enough. Far from being over, it will give you purpose and meaning like nothing else. Families must be supported to have children.
We are going badly wrong as a society if you have to win the lottery to feel financially able to form a family”
The average age to have your first baby is almost 32. For those who wait to own their own home first, it will be more likely be 36 or even 38. A 39-year-old builder with his own company said to me recently that if he won the lottery, he would start a family. We are going badly wrong as a society if you have to win the lottery to feel financially able to form a family. We are endlessly hectored to move with the times, but one constant that does not change is the biological window. We must support women to have babies in general and, in particular the ones they would otherwise abort. Our future depends on it.