David QuinnPoliticians who lost the party whip over the controversial law now stand vindicated says David Quinn
And so another abortion controversy unfolds. We don’t know the full details of this case and may never know all of them.
What we do know at the time of writing is that a woman presented herself to doctors seeking an abortion. There are conflicting reports as to how early in her pregnancy she did this. A friend has told The Irish Times that the woman had been raped and was in fear of her life.
We don’t know why she was in fear of her life. We know she is a non-national. Was she frightened of becoming a victim of a so-called ‘honour killing’? If so, then she should have been afforded the full protection of the State. Is this why she was having suicidal thoughts?
What we also know is that there was a delay of at least a few weeks between her developing suicidal thoughts and the termination of her pregnancy.
In addition, we know that her pregnancy did not end in an abortion but in the delivery of the baby three months short of its full-term.
Disability
However, because the baby was delivered at just 25 weeks into the pregnancy, there is a very strong chance that the baby will suffer a permanent disability or may not survive at all.
The head of the Rotunda hospital, Dr Sam Coulter Smith estimates that the baby has only a “20-30%” chance of leading a healthy, normal life. Those are small odds but thanks to our new abortion law, what is euphemistically called the ‘Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act’, this is what has happened to this unfortunate child.
On the other hand we should be thankful that the child is alive at all because it could easily have been aborted.
Pro-choice campaigners believe the child should have been aborted because that is what the mother wanted. Therefore, they are disgusted not that the child might be permanently disabled because it was delivered so early, but because it was not killed.
Outrage
They would put it in different terms of course. They would say the source of their disgust and outrage is that a very distressed mother was refused an abortion when she sought it. But whatever the source of their distress, the end result would be the same, namely a dead baby.
There is no doubt that this is a very difficult case. We don’t know for sure whether the woman at the centre of it is a rape victim, but even if that is not so, it is still very difficult because of her severe mental distress.
There is no neat and easy solution to a case like this. The mother’s circumstances are horrible and abortion is horrible. Doctors therefore must help both the mother and the child as best they can because they both need the best possible care. The baby clearly has not received the best possible care because it was delivered so early and will very likely be disabled as a result of that.
Let’s look again at what our new abortion law permits. It allows doctors to perform an abortion on a woman when a medical panel consisting of two psychiatrists and an obstetrician agrees she is suicidal and the only way to prevent her from committing suicide is to end her pregnancy.
The proposition that the one and only way to save a woman in such a situation is to end her pregnancy was always extremely contentious. It is the central reason why seven Fine Gael TDs and Senators voted against this law and were therefore expelled from the parliamentary party by Enda Kenny.
Can it really be that when a woman in pregnancy is suicidal there is simply no other way to save her than to abort her baby? Is that plausible? And is it plausible to say that once the abortion takes place her suicidal feelings will simply disappear? More likely her suicidal feelings arose from causes other than or in addition to her pregnancy.
This is why several hundred psychiatrists signed a statement during the debate over the abortion law objecting to the suicide provision.
Delivered
In fact, this very case shows that it is possible to care for a suicidal pregnant woman without rushing into an abortion. At least several weeks passed between the mother expressing a wish to have an abortion and the baby being delivered in which the mother was being cared for safely.
The case-at-hand shows both the terrible nature of our new law and the terrible logic of the pro-choice mentality.
It highlights the awful nature of our abortion law because it allows a baby to be aborted when a woman is deemed to be suicidal, even where there are other means of care available, or it allows for a baby to be delivered so prematurely there will be a high risk of the baby being disabled.
Doctors are now complaining that the law isn’t clear enough on whether they should abort or deliver the baby when it is at the point of viability outside the womb. Do they wish to be simply given the right to kill the baby, full stop?
The reason the case further highlights the awful logic of the pro-choice mentality is that the pro-choice lobby have left us in no doubt that the woman’s wish to have an abortion in this instance should have been carried out even though a delay of a few weeks meant the baby could be delivered, albeit very prematurely.
Many politicians who voted for this law did so in the pretence that it was ‘pro-life’. Delivering a baby so prematurely that it is highly likely to be disabled is not pro-life.
Those politicians now have no hiding place. The politicians who voted against this law, on the other hand, stand vindicated.