Irish Referendum result. Women 1 Catholic Church 0

“A landslide victory is an electoral victory in a political system, when one candidate or party receives an overwhelming supermajority of the votes or seats in the elected body, thus utterly eliminating the opponents”

It was a landslide Steve in the liberal press, the right wing press, in Anglers Weely, Exchange and Mart and the Beano :slight_smile:

“I am a man of principle. You are a bigot. He is an extremist.” I don’t think it’s extremist to be against abortion, especially when we look at the figures in the UK.

It seems to me that people who want abortion to be freely available but lack the courage of their principles call themselves “pro Choice”, to avoid having to use the toxic term “abortion”.

(It was a supermajority, rather than a simple majority, but not an “overwhelming” supermajority, and therefore on those terms not a landslide. Again, we use terms nowadays to support our positions rather than to reflect facts.)

But those are slight digressions. I agree with the point that many are making, about RCs in Eire and the Right in the US, that it seems their interest in care for people stops at the point of birth!

Do you think, friends, that many people voted for abortion to be available (on much more limited terms than it is in the UK, I see) almost as a way of saying “We’re no longer in thrall to the Catholic Church, which held us back and abused us for far too long”?

Maybe I’m overthinking it :slight_smile:

(PS My view is that any vote for abortion sets us on a slippery slope towards abortion on demand, which is the present position in the UK. I don’t think it makes sens to say a fertilised egg is the same as a foetus the day before delivery, but I can see no way of determining a boundary between potential life and cell cluster, since I think “viability” is an artificial construct.)

IMHO when men can have babies then they can have the choice !

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I am happy to say that I am pro-choice and also that I am pro-abortion. This vote was about women being able to chose what happens with their own bodies. Those that do not want an abortion can still take that path but those that do can now make that choice. This changes nothing for the pro-life, or anti-choice as I prefer to call them.

How can it be right that women and girls who conceive as a result of incest or rape should be forced to have the child? I can only imagine the horror of this situation. How can it be right that women are forced to continue with a pregnancy knowing that the child is catastrophically damaged with no hope of survival? Why is the life of an unborn child more important than that of a living woman?

I read this heartbreaking story yesterday. This is a good enough reason for me to support abortion.

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Absolutely Ann. Well said.

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Tragic story Mandy, reason enough, as you say.

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On demand, as early as possible, as late as necessary. Once the principle of abortion is agreed, then it can’t be any other way.

I don’t think anyone has an abortion lightheartedly and I don’t think it is resorted to instead of contraception, and even if it were that’s rather the person concerned’s business isn’t it.

It is remarkable that those entities most interested in preventing abortion are equally those least interested in proper prevention via education, and in supporting the babies once born. And frequently also the same entities which have no qualms about sending people, even teenagers, to death row - so clearly this concern for children stops the second they are born.

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“Hard cases make bad law” but that Huff Post article is an illustration of what I mean, assuming (as we all do, unquestioningly) it’s true. It’s a pretty tenuous link between a woman with cancer who then becomes pregnant (“unplanned”) and by so doing puts herself in a terrible dilemma.

Should such an unusual situation (as with rape, like incest, very rarely do these situations result in pregnancy) be what determines whether abortion is legalised? I don’t think so.

(Ann Coe, did you campaign for men to be excluded from the referendum, as a matter of interest? Did anyone? There was a time when only one gender was allowed to vote: are you suggesting we return to that? :wink: )

I don’t think such cases which must represent a vanishingly small percentage of people should really be the subject here. The vast majority of women (some are in fact children) seeking an abortion do it because they are in a situation where it is the lesser of two evils, it is voyeuristic and frankly not anyone else’s business to go raking through what their motivation is and forcing them to justify their decision. It also serves no purpose to label them feckless or immoral.

Abortion is a necessary evil not least because at the moment there is no

  1. genuine acceptance of the fact that babies have 2 parents, fathers aren’t made to contribute properly and in such a way that they can’t weasel out of it, to their offspring’s life up to end of studies.

  2. properly reliable freely available contraception which is everyone’s responsibility

  3. clear explicit effective sex education compulsory for all from about 3 -20 including thinking about bodily autonomy and personal integrity. Leading one hopes to less prurience and hypocrisy surrounding sexual behaviour and its various possible consequences.

(At the moment parents in the UK can withdraw their children from sex ed because ‘it gives them ideas’ well we all know withdrawal isn’t reliable.)

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Hit the nail on the head as usual Vero. Your last 2 posts are fabulous. Thank you.

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Dear me @Porridge - what’s it like up there ? :innocent: :innocent: :innocent:

Véronique, I wonder if you have any evidence to back up your claim that “The vast majority of women (some are in fact children) seeking an abortion do it because they are in a situation where it is the lesser of two evils”.

In the UK in 2014, there were more than 600,000 abortions. It plainly isn’t because of freely available contraception; it plainly isn’t because of lack of education.

It rather throws us back onto the option you don’t want to consider, fecklessness, doesn’t it?

(I completely agree that the problem is not restricted to women who get pregnant despite the odds in favour of being able to avoid it: young men who are able to simply walk away from their responsibilities are just as much of a problem, though perhaps less relevant to this problem.)

Simon, I think you’re teasing me :slight_smile: so I will turn the other cheek :smiley:

You asked Vero for evidence so it’s only fair to ask for evidence to back up your number of 600,000 abortions in the UK in 2014.

The UK government report attached below says that “There were 190,406 abortions carried out in England and Wales in 2016, slightly lower than
in 2015 (191,014).”

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More abortion statistics from an anti-abortion group. 201,868 in the UK in 2014.

Where on earth did you get your 600,000 number from? Are you really trying to support your argument with false statistics that are easy to verify?

http://abort73.com/abortion_facts/uk_abortion_statistics/

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@Stevie: Just a word in your shell-like, en passant: could we have a proper name, photo of yourself rather than the late Johnny, etc. please, in keeping with forum rules? Thank you.

"It rather throws us back onto the option you don’t want to consider, fecklessness, "

So for the sake of argument, were fecklessness to be the cause, is it all right to inflict a life sentence on a person who is the unwanted result of fecklessness and will be brought up in fecklessness? Who exactly are you seeking to punish? And why?

I think your notions of the efficacy of modern contraceptive knowledge and praxis is perhaps misplaced and based purely on in vitro experimentation ie in ideal conditions.

Your figures don’t stand up and it is a non-sequitur (even were they correct) to state: " It plainly isn’t because of freely available contraception; it plainly isn’t because of lack of education."

Sorry, I don’t know where I got the 600,000 figure from. I can’t find it again. It was carelessness (fecklessness, Véronique :slight_smile: ), probably.

But even on the correct figures, it’s an enormous number. It seems to have stabilised, but it isn’t reducing, despite lots of contraception and education. Bluntly, I don’t believe that around 200,000 women find themselves pregnant each year by complete accident. (Of course, for some there will have been contraceptive failure, but as far as I know there are no stats for that, probably because we have what is in effect abortion on demand.)

I don’t understand your point about punishment, Véronique. I don’t imagine many people for whom abortion ceased to be an option would take out their frustration on their child (who was born as a result): that seems to me to be a very bleak view of people.

I know people who have adopted. It seems a very satisfactory alternative to abortion!

I’ll look out a picture of myself. It may take some time to find one which won’t frighten you all :slight_smile:

Are you also counting all the abortions on medical grounds? Do you agree with those? Because morally there is no difference.

Now to the fecklessness did you not see what I said about sex ed in GB?
So, re punishment: a ‘feckless’ teenager/ignorant young woman/person lacking capacity
who gets pissed/pressured into sex/is misled into thinking they are in a relationship
gets pregnant by somebody who is happy to plant the seed but not to look after the fruit: should she then be obliged to keep the accidental result?
And the child? What sort of lookout is it for the eventual child? So let’s probably write off 2 lives…

A child should come into the world because it is actively wanted or at least not actively unwanted.
If its own parent(s) won’t /can’t/don’t know how to look after it the state isn’t going to step in, is it. I don’t see “oh but adoption” as anything but a makeshift solution.

Just look at what happened to so many Irish babies, the staggering mortality rate in a developed country where a baby is obviously precious only up to the moment of birth.

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What’s the population figure of U.K…??? 190,000ish abortions isn’t really that high…what’s the adoption rate in UK…??? The number of children taken into care by social services who actually don’t have the resources to look after them and many taken under false pretences…??? My 3 were planned and I was in my early 20’s as were my daughters when they started families…I’m not sure what I would have done if I had ever been unexpectedly expecting a fourth child…I was told after my first two daughters that a third (my son) would probably kill me…and it almost did…It certainly isn’t up to the RC church whose talking heads aren’t exactly pillars of virtue to make decisions for the rest of us…I hear the pope is lamenting dwindling numbers…I’m not surprised… x :slight_smile:

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