Time for a grown-up abortion debate
Pro-choice and pro-life campaigners have been ramping up their campaigns lately. But there’s no use in Ireland burying its collective head in the sand any longer. With women continuing to travel abroad for terminations, the time has come for the status quo to be challenged.
Adrienne Murphy, 05 Oct 2012
“In the UK, those women can terminate at any time on the NHS, but if they’re from Ireland, they have to stick to the 23 weeks and five days limit. So if you find out at 20 weeks that there’s something horribly wrong with your wanted baby, you then you have a week or two to come up with £2,000 to travel and get the procedure – at the same time as going through the shock and grief of the news. It’s barbaric.”
It certainly is.
“The thing that we really like to make clear,” asserts Clarke, “is that we don’t get involved in the morality argument. Because the women who contact us, a lot of them, believe with all their hearts that they are killing a baby. And they’re doing it anyway, because it’s what they have to do. Criminalising abortion does not reduce abortion; it just makes it inconvenient for women who have money, and almost impossibly difficult for women who don’t.”
There is one thing in particular that she is anxious to debunk.
“The anti-abortionists talk about ‘post abortion stress’ disorder; I’d like to talk about pre-abortion stress disorder, and the people who are calling us from Ireland in floods of tears, who are trying to raise the money and figure out childcare and get themselves over…
“There is no end to the desperation that we are hearing about. Women are going to disreputable money-lenders; they’re also selling their cars; and they’re not paying their rent. A lot of women that we hear from have supportive partners, and even between the two of them they’re only able to come up with a fraction of the amount of money required. But there are also many women ringing in saying the men want nothing to do with it: he said it wasn’t his, he spat in my face, he told me where to go – all of that and more. These men are not being forced to run the gauntlet of moral right and wrong and financial hardship.”
But in Ireland in 2012, the women are. It has to change. It has to stop…
Contact the Abortion Support Network at
www.abortionsupport.org.uk
Page 9/9 <Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Next>
Adrienne Murphy
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