DUBLIN, Ireland — The Irish bishops’ conference is insisting that almost all the options recommended by a recent report for changing the country’s abortion laws are unacceptable, since allowing abortion cannot be morally justified.
“Of the four options presented by the Report, three involve abortion — the direct and intentional killing of an unborn child. This can never be morally justified,” the bishops wrote in their Dec. 5 initial response to the report.
The Irish government is debating a 58-page report on abortion that advocates abortion legislation and abortion regulation, the Irish newspaper The Independent reports.
The report was released Nov. 27 after its preparation by a group of 14 experts who debated abortion regulation in the Republic of Ireland.
The expert group was formed in response to a Dec. 2010 decision by the European Court of Human Rights that Irish law is unclear about the legality of abortion.
An 1861 law, still in effect in Ireland, bans abortion, and the 1983 constitution recognizes unborn children’s’ right to life “with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother,” which the European court upheld.
In 1992, the country’s Supreme Court, in its “X case” decision, ruled that abortion was lawful if there was a significant risk to the life of the mother as a result of her pregnancy.
Yet in the 20 years since the ruling, lawmakers have refrained from revising Irish abortion law.
The European court’s 2010 ruling was in response to a suit filed by three women in Ireland who traveled elsewhere to procure abortions.
The Irish bishops’ conference said Dec. 5 that society’s duty is to “defend and promote the equal right to life of a pregnant mother and the innocent and defenseless child in her womb when the life of either of these persons is at risk.”
Ethical Distinction
The bishops distinguished between abortion, “the direct and intentional destruction of an unborn baby,” and medical treatments for a pregnant woman “which may put the life of her baby at risk.”
Those procedures include treatments for ectopic pregnancy, preeclampsia, or cancer in cases where a woman is pregnant.
But the bishops took issue with the expert group’s report because it “put forward options that could end the practice of making this vital ethical distinction in Irish hospitals.”
They found it worrisome that the report “provides no ethical analysis of the options available,” given that abortion is “first and foremost a moral issue.”
Another concern raised by the report is that it presents a false legal dilemma, omitting viable options such as a constitutional prohibition on abortion, a constitutional amendment reversing the 1992 “X case” judgment, or the adoption of guidelines clarifying when life-saving treatments may be provided.
Pro-life groups were similarly alarmed by the report. Ide Nic Athuna of Youth Defence told EWTN News Nov. 28 that adoption of the recommendations could “basically lead to abortion on demand.”
The bishops advised that “a matter of this importance deserves sufficient time for a calm, rational and informed debate to take place before any decision about the options offered by the Expert Group Report are taken. All involved, especially public representatives, must consider the profound moral questions that arise in responding to this Report.”
“Abortion is gravely immoral in all circumstances, no matter how ‘limited’ access to abortion may be,” they said.
Vigil For Life
On Dec. 4, thousands of Irish pro-life demonstrators packed the street outside of the Dáil Eireann in Dublin for a Vigil for Life, calling on the legislature not to pass any laws that would allow abortion.
“We need to ensure that both our mothers and babies are best protected by banning abortion,” said Niamh Ui Bhrian of the Ireland pro-life group Life Institute.
Attendees at the candlelight vigil included adults, children, college students, clergy and church groups, who asked the government to protect both mothers and their unborn babies.
Some carried signs asking Ireland’s Prime Minister Enda Kenny to “keep his pro-life promise” which the Fine Gael party leader made in the 2011 election.
Lawyer Caroline Simons, a member of the vigil organizer Pro Life Campaign, told vigil attendees there is “no going back” once the government implements legislation.
“Any reassurances that you’re going to be given over the next two months that abortion won’t be introduced and they’re going to talk about medical intervention on limited grounds is false,” she said.
Ui Bhrian said such legislation would make Ireland follow the British approach to abortion, a system “anathema” to most Irish people.
Several Catholic bishops attended the rally, including Archbishop Michael Neary of Tuam.
Mother’s Death Misrepresented?
While the Irish government has considered changes to abortion law since January, controversy erupted after the Oct. 28 death of Savita Halappanavar in a Galway hospital. She died of an infection following a miscarriage after reportedly asked for an abortion.
Although an investigation into the case is ongoing, pro-abortion-rights advocates have contended that an abortion would have saved her life.
However, The journalist who broke the news about Halappanavar’s death has admitted that the first reported version of the story may be based on faulty recollection on the part of the woman’s husband.
Kitty Holland’s Nov. 14 story for The Irish Times suggested that Savita Halappanavar died because elective abortion is illegal in the Republic of Ireland. It was headlined “Woman ‘denied a termination’ dies in hospital.”
Halappanavar’s autopsy has revealed that she died of blood poisoning and E. coli ESBL, an antibiotic-resistant strain of the bacterium.
Uí Bhriain said the vigil “remembered Savita and her baby, and we mourned the loss of their lives.”
However, she said vigil participants ask that “the media and the political establishment now look at the cynical exploitation of this tragic death of a young mother, and seek to find the facts.”
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I pray for Ireland every day as I drive past a little Catholic church named for St. Patrick.I’ll add this issue to my prayer requests, too.
It is regretable watching this activity in Ireland, from Glasgow that the Irish people have taken this lead from a Europe that is gradually killing itself culturally, economically and morally. By adopting this failed agenda.
An agenda which clearly can be seen as having marked the decline of western Europe since its inception in Britain in the mid to late sixties.
The individuals who have perpetrated this disaster are now in their elder years and will probably expect care as they enter their second childhood. (One more than they denied to the thousands of dead children).
Recently it was interesting to hear the collective sigh of relief from the trendy lefties when it was reported that survival rates for the unborn child under 24 weeks was not improving due to scientific / medical improvements. If they had, you see, it would have created something of a dilema in UK, with hospitals killing babies in one theatre and trying their best to save them in another. At the whim of parents or medics I suppose.
Now the system can rest assured that neither group will be saved.
In the previous “tiger” years we witnessed in Ireland a slippage into a period of greed, coupled with a revisionist culture that would embarass the intellectuals of Larkhall (or to misquote Ronnie Drew The Devil in Hell), Ireland also suffered a massive fall from grace by the church. Come on Ireland, please at least show hospitality to your children.
Robert Wilson ,
Thanks for your comments.I’m glad to see solid, prolife sentiments from Scotland.
I read the BBC news online daily & saw that while the outcome for children born under 24 weeks had not improved much, the outcome for children born after that point was decidedly better.I think you can find the data in the BBC Health News section.
What do you think will happen in Scotland if the vote’s for independence?Many of us who are American with Scottish ancestry think independence sounds like a great idea, but we don’t have to live there.I’ve read good things about the Church in Scotland but get a feeling Scottish politics may lean even to the left of England.I worry about the future of Ireland, Scotland & the rest of Europe, too.
U S Bishops’ schools without exception place materials before the eyes of innocent youth that put their souls at risk and endanger all society. Sexualied catechetics is not only removing natural blush and shame, it is destroying sound princples of virtues and lead youth to be helplessly controlled by vices. See a description of the series “Growing In Love” with imprimatur. May this information provoke you enough to speak out. If not you the reader, than WHO?
http://www.motherswatch.net/content/view/12/6/ - Part 1
http://www.motherswatch.net/content/view/15/6/ - Part 2
“Halappanavar’s autopsy has revealed that she died of blood poisoning and E. coli ESBL, an antibiotic-resistant strain of the bacterium”
And the blood poisoning was the result of not properly treating an incomplete miscarriage - which is properly treated with a termination, ie. a “direct” abortion.
Rather than deny that what morally falls under “direct” abortion is sometimes necessary to save a woman’s life (here, the Phoenix case) or health (ectopic pregnancy - much better for the woman to flush it out with methotrexate than to have her entire tube surgically removed), just acknowledge that the Catholic teaching is a “hard” teaching. Acknowledge that the teaching occasionally leads to women dying or being unnecessary mutilated in order to preserve the distinction between “direct” and “indirect”, even in cases where the fetus will die anyway.
Pregnancy and childbirth are messy, complicated, unsentimental things that often result in serious conflicts of interest between the wellbeing of mother and child. They are not black and white. There are blighted ovums, chemical pregnancies, incomplete miscarriages, ruptured membranes, incompetent cervixes, fetuses who are discovered to have all their organs growing outside their bodies, eclampsia, just to name a few things. Just saying “love them both” is useless and trite. It doesn’t acknowledge the medical or physical reality. Bishops are so far removed from this, this thing which belongs to the messy sphere of women and doctors with all its physicality and ambiguity, and yet they make black and white scholastic pronouncements and abstractly sentimentalize these things they have no experience of in the concrete. Unfortunately, their academics and sentimentality has real consequences for real women.
Almost every other religious tradition in the world privileges this life of the mother OVER the life of a fetus, including the Jewish tradition which is the foundation for Christianity, for a reason.
It floors me that the asking insurance companies to pay *with their own money* for the contraception of employees of peripherally Catholic institutions* is considered a “violation of religious liberty”, but forcing a non-Catholic woman to sacrifice her life to Thomistic principals she doesn’t believe in is not. What happened to Savita: THAT is what a real violation against religious freedom looks like.
*The dirty little secret is that most Catholic Hospitals and Universities already cover contraception for their employees, and that state laws to this effect have been in place for years. Dioceses, parish schools, and parishes all still exempt under Obamacare, as they always have been. The “Religious Liberty” bloviating is just that, drumming up a non-issue to rally the troops and ignore confronting the real issues facing families today.
AF ,
Unless you were directly involved in this medical case you are unlikely to have all the facts.And this applies to anyone else who comments, including me.
Kathleen, Your instruction to AF goes for anything that is presented in the N C R columns.
But, more importantly, why aren’t the presenters of these discussions blessing the readers (before the readers post comments) with the knowledge of what the Catholic teachings in regards to their topic?
Valuable space is wasted if they do not. Since they rarely do, it appears morality and ethics are open for discussion and no sound principles have ever been taught by the Catholic Church.
When the columnist is silent on the principles of the One True Faith in regards to their topic, and if sound Catholic- substantiated teachings are absent, then one has a duty to question their motive.
Hear are facts:
This is a site that pro-death - anti-women, anti life must read:
“The Blackmun Wall” is a listing of the women killed by legal abortions, along with information regarding the circumstances of their death. We named this project after Harry Blackmun. Justice Blackmun was the U.S. Supreme Court justice who wrote the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion and launched America’s Holocaust.
The abortion picture painted by pro-choice advocates is that the US Supreme Court and Justice Harry Blackmun’s Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton decisions turned abortionists into doctors. Abortion clinic operators like Planned Parenthood like to pretend that the decision written by Justice Blackmun made abortions safe and legal, but the truth is that making abortion legal never made abortion safe. Abortionists are the bottom-feeders of the medical profession and abortion procedures jeopardize the health of the mother in order to terminate pregnancy. ‘Safe legal abortions’ killed every one of the women on this site. ........
As you review this list, please remember that the hundreds of pro-choice women listed here represents only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to abortion deaths. We have statistics from both state and federal reporting agencies documenting many more abortion-related deaths than are listed here. However, because we had no further details on them we were not able to include them. Additionally, our research clearly indicates that, for a variety of reasons, the overwhelming majority of abortion-related deaths remain undiscovered.
For all those who do not value the life of the mother and are pro choice:
visit “The Blackmun Wall”
“The Blackmun Wall is a listing of the women killed by legal abortions, along with information regarding the circumstances of their death. We named this project after Harry Blackmun. Justice Blackmun was the U.S. Supreme Court justice who wrote the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion and launched America’s Holocaust.
The abortion picture painted by pro-choice advocates is that the US Supreme Court and Justice Harry Blackmun’s Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton decisions turned abortionists into doctors. Abortion clinic operators like Planned Parenthood like to pretend that the decision written by Justice Blackmun made abortions safe and legal, but the truth is that making abortion legal never made abortion safe. Abortionists are the bottom-feeders of the medical profession and abortion procedures jeopardize the health of the mother in order to terminate pregnancy. ‘Safe legal abortions’ killed every one of the women on this site.
As you review this list, please remember that the hundreds of pro-choice women listed here represents only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to abortion deaths. We have statistics from both state and federal reporting agencies documenting many more abortion-related deaths than are listed here. However, because we had no further details on them we were not able to include them. Additionally, our research clearly indicates that, for a variety of reasons, the overwhelming majority of abortion-related deaths remain undiscovered…”.
http://www.lifedynamics.com/Pro-life_Group/Pro-choice_Women/
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