The letter below was emailed by me to THE IRISH TIMES On 2nd December 2015. With its customary courage the paper refused to publish it..
The American feminist Gloria Steinem was interviewed deferentially on British TV a few days ago. She appeared compos mentis and in good physical shape at 81 years old. She said that she had had an (illegal) abortion in Britain when she was 23 and that it was for her “a life-changing experience.”
But she appears to be such a solipsist that it never occurred to her that it was a human life-ending experience for someone else.
A day or two later Senator Ivana Bacik and one other, wrote in THE IRISH TIMES that the 8th Amendment to Ireland’s Constitution “had cast a blight on a generation.”
I think that in Ireland the word blight recalls the deaths of millions of human beings, most of whose births and deaths were never individually recorded in any paper of record, and whose opinions would never have been accepted for publication in an organ of the bien- pensant bourgeoisie.
The 8th Amendment was enacted by citizens to preserve and protect human life from arbitrary destruction. To pretend otherwise is nonsense.
.
A while back a healthy, 24 year- old woman from Cork complained about having to travel to London to have an abortion because she would have preferred to have it done locally and “to be at home cuddling my dog now, in my own bed.”
She was the focus of an abortion- promoting media circus featuring Kitty Holland of THE IRISH TIMES and a BBC 3 TV programme “Abortion: Ireland’s Guilty Secret?”
Seems that if you lie down with dogs you get up with the BBC.
The programme claimed that the woman, “Tara” and her partner “Steve” “took 2 weeks to raise almost 1,000 Euro for the journey,accommodation and procedure.”
I wonder how much money they needed to buy the advertising they got in the media. Or am I asking the right question?
It seems to me that the BBC, by focussing on the woman’s journey, but not showing “the procedure” were staging Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, or even presenting an omelette without depicting the breaking of eggs.
“Tara” and “Steve” took part in the documentary, “Tara” says
“Because someone needs to share their story. There are women going over daily for abortion,but still it’s something nobody will talk about.”
Well Tara, you got me talkin’.
Donal Kennedy
London
Corrrection
Ms STEINEM had her abortion in England shortly after the procedure was decrimnalalised under certain (limited) conditions.
Abortion on demand was not legislated for in 1967.
So far as I know it has not been since.
Donal Kennedy.
Surely somebody will take issue with me
or endorse my remarks…
If someone can convince me that when a Woman is With Child the Life of that Child merits no more
preservation than a piece of Shite I Promise to withdraw my comment.