The Westminster vote for Abortion in Northern Ireland, like the Irish vote last year, left me with a sick feeling in the stomach, but it was the celebrations that was the most difficult to understand . How could this be? How could there be such exuberant rejoicing over a law that would allow the taking of life. I still can’t get my head round that. People could not have been celebrating the poisoning, stabbing with a sharp tube the breaking of bones and the suction pump to destroy human life in a womb.  The facts are there and we don’t need a lot of imagination to know how horrific the “procedure” is.  I often wonder how something as awful as this has been sanitised and smoothed over so that it has become a simple aspect of contemporary life, one we simply accept, almost without question.

I remember the passing of David Steel’s bill in 1967. I knew then that it was wrong but I also knew that it was complicated and that I was pretty ignorant of the facts and not sensitive to the nuances. Over the years, I have known friends , close friends, who have had abortions. Some described the act as “handing the suffering little life into God’s care”. I have also known other couples who have defied the doctor’s advice and the mother has carried the baby for the full term only for that life to have a few hours post birth.  I also know two amazing young women who would not be alive today, and the world poorer, if the doctor’s advice was taken. One was said to be living off the other and the only hope was that the weakest be aborted in the hope that the stronger would survive. The parents with astonishing faith and resolution defied the advice of the medics to abort both lives, stuck their ground and the miracle is there to be seen. I also have many Irish friends and I often wonder if some of them are alive today simply because they were born in Ireland. Still, I cannot judge anyone and I would not, but I do know that the passing of that law then and now was an evil act. 

It was the facts that rattled me out of my complacency. I heard little of them in 1967. I don’t remember any great protest and even the church (the catholic church being the exception) was surprisingly mute. I heard a lot about the curse of “back street abortions” as the main driver behind the law. It happens anyway so legalising would make it safe. I never saw the illogical nature of that argument. If you applied it to any other social evil it would make no sense at all. Just think about it. But of how abortions were actually carried out, I remained blissfully ignorant. Why should I need to know? The pro-abortion agencies were shy on the detail too with good reason. They still sugar coat the thing as the briefest of looks at the Mary Stopes or Planned Parenthood websites will show. They don’t tell you about the sharpened tube, the breaking of bones and the suction pump and they do their utmost to avoid any suggestion that it is nothing more than a simple medical procedure. Now it is difficult to be ignorant and unaware. The facts are out there despite the attempt to stifle them. The testimonies of so many people who have had direct experience, as well as those who have survived the attempt to kill them before birth, demonstrate what a truly abominable thing we have been complicit in.

John Waters, the Irish journalist, speaking before the vote in the Republic put it bluntly:  “If this abomination passes, it will be the first time that a people have voted to strike down the rights, the fundamental human rights, of a section of their own number….It’s unprecedented in human history.”

Striking at the fundamental right of the unborn – the right to life in the name of human rights, as it was defended by politicians including our first minister, this week, makes the whole idea of human rights now quite meaningless.

Na Mheoig gan Breith – the living without birth.