Whom do you trust?
We’ve heard it all before: a man brutally murders a woman, and everyone’s in shock. Perhaps after the debate that followed the reporting of the murder of Clodagh Hawe and her three sons by her husband a couple of years ago, journalists and editors are thinking twice, even thrice before publishing praise of Mark Hennessy, the man now found to have strangled the young Jastine Valdez to death in Wicklow. But no editor can make the words of locals go away, describing him as a “quiet man”, a “normal fellow”, “a normal dad” from “a well-respected family”.
Of course he wasn’t all that normal. Married with kids, sure – but convicted of abusive behaviour and due in court for drink driving, crashing into vehicles and leaving the scene. The neighbours did describe him as a “weirdo”, after all.
And still, everyone’s in shock. That an abusive weirdo who hits and runs would murder a young woman in the context of a small country where ten women are murdered by men every year and 42% of women experience sexual violence, is apparently unthinkable. Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether he was normal or an oddball – that a man, any man, among us would brutally murder a woman is just shocking, full stop.
In a week when we are taking to the polling stations to decide whether we trust women to make sound decisions about their families or not, this feels poignant. The NO side keeps talking about ‘social abortions’, ‘abortion on demand’ and abortion ‘for no reason at all’, while the YES side insists that many reasons are in fact pretty good, important reasons – but even those of us who believe it barely dare to say out loud that maybe women should just be trusted to decide themselves which reasons are good enough and which aren’t. Because that would just be a bonkers notion, wouldn’t it – trusting women, no rules. Giving them rights, not regulations.
The evidence shows that it makes sense: you can trust women to make their own reproductive decisions. No floodgates tend to open, and they don’t tend to go off having a load of abortions – that’s what the statistics say. They still have kids, families still prosper, despite the lack of a constitutional amendment forcing them to. It just seems unlikely, shocking almost. Trusting a man is easier, somehow – even when the evidence shows he’s a murderer.
How many family men must go rogue for it to become a trope? How long must we behave for the trope of the selfish, loose woman to go away? When a man like Hennessy all but murders a woman, raping her and leaving her pregnant, then whom do we trust? Then an abusive weirdo continues to walk among us, and she becomes the criminal.
If the polls are right, we might just win it. Not unregulated access – but some access. A little bit of trust, within reason. Yet it’s looking close enough still that it’s clear that a huge amount of voters in Ireland are genuinely convinced that women would have abortions ‘for no reason’ if you only let them. Enough people think that women’s judgement is so poor that they don’t even realise they’re ready and able for pregnancy, birth and motherhood, so clouded that we need to be forcibly kept pregnant in order to demonstrate the value of motherhood. Then we’ll live happily ever after – or maybe not, but at least our babies will be born.
That’s reasonable to a huge number of Irish voters. Sensible, normal – not shocking in the slightest. With the week that’s in it, I have to admit that’s pretty hard to stomach.
Love thy neighbour
She’s a lovely woman. She often stops by to chat when she’s on her way somewhere and my two sons are playing in the front garden. She tells me they’re adorable, such a gift. And she’s right – they are a gift. She means it in a slightly different way to how I see it, of course; she thinks of them as gifts from God. But we agree that they’re a blessing, if in a non-religious sense for me.
When we first moved in, she asked if we were renting or had bought. She wanted to know if we were truly settling, I guess. She told us she’d grown up around the corner, one of 11 siblings. They’re tiny houses, even tinier back then. Eleven of them! That would’ve been cosy – at best. And she loves the area, loves seeing new families settle and make it their home.
And so today she came to my door and called me a murderer. She said there was a special place in hell, waiting for me. And I knew she wasn’t trying to hurt me; her intent was someplace else altogether, wrapped up in gory images of babies branded as aborted foetuses that in reality never looked that plump and fully-formed, in notions of motherhood as holy and children as gifts from God. I don’t know why I even opened the door. This was a no-win situation.
Nor do I know why I asked that we remain respectful to each other and leave it be, our ‘Yes’ sign proudly on display in the window. Of course she couldn’t respect a baby murderer. Of course she wouldn’t hear me when I said I lost a baby, I lost him. Those images don’t wash away that easily – I get that. And I wasn’t trying to convince her, I wasn’t trying to win her over. I didn’t want to lecture her, nor to make her feel uncomfortable or upset. So I stood on my doorstep, a lovely old neighbour repeatedly accusing me of being a murderer.
And yes, we’d bought – we were hoping to settle here.
What has the Catholic church done to us as a society? What has it done if we can no longer talk to each other, listen and disagree, hold the hurt and pain and still live side by side without calling each other names? How did the teaching of loving thy neighbour so utterly fade away?
I grew up in a religious family – not a religious family like the one she came from, and not of that same religion, but one where faith was present, however unorthodoxly. And in everything I saw, in everything I was taught, there was one sentiment that overpowered them all, an omnipresent message that came to define my values and politics long after I left the church: we all have intrinsic value, and we all deserve to be loved and respected and treated as equals, regardless of where we come from and what we look like and how we choose to live.
For me, that’s what this referendum is all about. It is about the right of that woman whose baby is dying inside her to be surrounded by her family and non-judgemental medical professionals when she grieves. It is about the right of a woman whose health – mental or physical – is at stake to be treated with respect, whatever decision she makes when she discovers that she is pregnant. It is about the right of a woman in an abusive relationship to be trusted when she says that she is not safe if pregnant, and of a mother of four whose contraception fails to be met with compassion and support when she realises that there is only one decision her finances and family are able for. It is about the right of a student who always wanted to be a mother to give in to the feeling that it couldn’t possibly come at a worse time, that it just can’t happen right now – and to own that decision, whether she ends up regretting it or not.
This referendum is not just about abortion, but about those core values we as societies and communities owe each other to uphold, even when the posters we display in our windows don’t match. In some ways it’s not about abortion at all, because abortion is a fact of life and always has been; but it is about how we deal with it and how we treat those who need it – with trust and compassion, however reluctant, or with promises of a special place in hell.
She’s a lovely woman, and I don’t need her to agree with me to think that about her. I can see beyond the God that promotes silence and shame and sweeping secrets under the rug and crying behind closed doors, see that beyond that, we share a faith in defending what we believe is right. But this referendum isn’t going away, and one of us is going to be at the losing end.
It won’t be easy, but I’m hoping that – with time – we’ll be able to smile at each other in the street and she’ll find it in her heart to compliment my children again and ask how we’re finding the neighbourhood. Because I can accept and respect differences of faith and conviction, even reach above and around them, celebrate them – but I can’t let you walk up to my door, call me a murderer and yet claim to ‘love them both’.
Why I'm marching: for real care and real respect, without judgement
I remember vividly the feeling the first time I found out I was pregnant: the magic of it all, trying to comprehend that what was there inside me was the beginnings of a new life, the beginnings of what could become our firstborn, half me and half him. One loss and two unfathomably amazing children later, I sit here trying to imagine the feeling of finding out now: the panic of it all, knowing full well what that teeny, tiny thing inside would be the beginnings of and how life-changing it would be.
We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life. I’m marching on Saturday because I don’t think ‘life’ is that simple.
I remember vividly the moment everything changed – a sonographer’s silence as she turned the screen away from us. I had experienced grief before and immediately recognised it: a black curtain that closes in front of your eyes, forever shutting out the world as you once knew it. He kicked furiously inside me. “It’s good that it’s happening to us,” I kept telling myself. “We’re strong – we can get through this.”
Along with the sadness I feel when I think about our firstborn, there is a deep, deep sense of gratitude. The care we received was so utterly dignified, the consultant so objectively professional yet supportive, the midwives so warm and caring that we spent weeks talking about them afterwards. It was the definition of ‘care’. I hate the memory of those Whittington corridors, the feeling of walking down the hill from Highgate in leafy north London. But the NHS will always have a special place in my heart, because at a time of numbing grief, we were treated with nothing but respect.
Life isn’t black and white. It comes in full colour, full of bright highs and all different shades of tough, indiscernible grey. There’s no such thing as sheer existence – we feel it, we try to make sense of it, we make decisions and move on. And therein lies the power of it all: we can’t choose what will happen to us, but we can choose how to deal with it – provided our jurisdiction trusts us to.
We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life, about the need to voice the interests of the voiceless. I’m marching on Saturday because I’m not convinced they can.
We trust pregnant people to mind themselves throughout the sometimes tumultuous experience of a pregnancy, to prepare for the arrival of a new human being who will need their complete attention every moment of every day for years to come, to deal with all the difficult decisions and choices they’ll face as they rise to the challenge of being a parent. How can we decide for their unborn children that sheer existence, the idea of life as absolute, is the best thing for them – no matter how their mother feels, no matter the challenges she’s facing or her feelings of doubt?
We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life. I’m marching on Saturday because most of the time, it sounds more like they’re talking about the right to birth – the right to arrive into this world no matter the cost, no matter the implications for their siblings, no matter how suicidal their mother is or if she’s been absolutely certain her entire life that motherhood is not for her; indeed no matter the experience of the pregnant person facing months of answering well-intended questions about due dates and plans, knowing that the baby is slowly but surely dying and there will be no such thing as a life at the end of it.
We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life, and I’m growing really, really tired of it. I’m marching on Saturday because all too often, people tell me they’re pro-life but that what we went through was different – and that’s got nothing to do with life, nor does it have anything to do with choice. That’s telling me that my choice was allowed because I grieved, and that next time, maybe, if they can’t put themselves in my shoes, they’ll deem me a criminal. It’s draining life of all its rich, challenging colour, leaving a watered-down version seeping with shame and fear.
I’m marching on Saturday because I want real care and real respect, and the way things stand, Ireland gives me none of it.
This was written for and originally published by the Abortion Rights Campaign.
We need to talk about choice
I don’t quite know what to say about Savita’s death. I’m lost for words, but I have to say something, because silence is acceptance, and acceptance is condonation. I wrote, fuelled by anger and frustration, about the Irish abortion laws a while ago, and I think that post explains pretty well how pathetic I think any excuse not to legislate in the wake of Savita’s death would be. I don’t need to write that post again.
I need to add, though, that I’ve been uncomfortable with some of the debate that’s taken place since that post was written. Some pretty powerful campaigns were carried out, and some very admirable efforts were taken to bring this debate back onto a mainstream media platform – and quite successfully so – but all these progressive voices had one thing in common: the word ‘if’.
Taking on the pro-life forces in Ireland is a huge challenge, I realise that. Yet, I find it hard to accept that this has been allowed to compromise the message of the pro-choice, or I should say pro-choice-if, campaigns. The conservative Catholic heritage appears to be so powerful that no one dares to get down to the core of the issue and say that choice must be about a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, no matter what. The so-called progressive voice has had to settle for bite-sized baby steps, working hard to bring into force legislation that legalises abortion in very extreme cases, if…
Every little helps. Of course. And this is what the women in the Guardian article I mentioned in the aforementioned post understandably argued: they should have had the right to terminate their pregnancies, because they were already deemed futile – their babies were incompatible with life. This is what some will argue in the wake of Savita’s death, too: one should have the right to terminate a pregnancy that is already about to end, if the mother’s life is in danger. Abortion per se, then, is still considered morally wrong; there is no choice to talk about, after all.
Going from the current embarrassing state of affairs to one where abortion is legal and accepted might seem impossible. I understand that. I’m just not sure the debate, in its current shape, is doing much good. It’s a tough challenge for pro-choice campaigners, but right now we’re only beating around the bush.
We need to talk about the fact that the Irish government still thinks it has the right to control women’s bodies. And we need to talk about the fact that, as a result of this, women are dying. Now, if the government is in control and people die, whom should we hold responsible?
Fuming with anger: on Irish political cowardice
I have just watched the video attached to this Guardian article about the increase in Irish women seeking help for abortions abroad, and I am beyond myself with anger, frustration and disbelief. I know that this is what happens in Ireland; I know that it’s inhumane and barbaric yet allowed to go on, but sometimes I forget. Sometimes I forget, and then an article like this comes along and I feel like taking the next ferry over to Dublin and knock on the door of every Fine Gael and Labour TD and tell them about Oliver and show them that there is no sense, no reason, no high-held religious principle that can justify what goes on.
I want every woman and every couple to have the right to free abortion with no questions asked, and I know that such a claim can sound both extreme and unrealistic in a climate like that in Ireland. But all subtle nuances and gestational distinctions put aside, how anyone can listen to these women who wanted so badly to be parents, who lost their children, who were given no choice and who without even blinking can say that they would have welcomed a disabled child with special needs had that been their lot, who were forced to go through their grief being judged by their own society, and say that the current abortion laws in Ireland make sense – that is, like these women say, just barbaric, inhumane and completely crazy.
When couples are given no choice, when they are told that their baby has a fatal abnormality, sticking our heads in the sand and saying that abortion is wrong because an embryo immediately after conception becomes an Irish citizen does not lead to a world where more women carry a dying foetus to term and we can go on with a clean conscience knowing that nobody’s been killed, let’s not pretend that that’s what’s happening. What these laws are saying is pretty clear: we can’t be bothered to take difficult debates about life and death, a couple’s right to choose and a woman’s right to control her own body, so we throw equality out the window and make it all about class.Under the current Fine Gael and Labour government in Ireland, and under all previous Irish governments, a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body is all about class.
The fundamental right, as such, does not exist – but you can buy it. I never quite got my head around Fine Gael’s ideological stance, but that something like this can go on in the name of a modern Labour party, that’s both ironic and a bit hard to stomach. Can you afford to travel abroad for your horrific procedure? Then go, have it done; just don’t do it on Irish soil. We don’t want your morally complicated grief here. Can’t afford it? Well there you go – your dying baby is a dying Irish citizen. Watch and feel it grow.