Wages of War, Part 2: How Forced Sterilization Came to Japan
by John Whitehead
See Part 1: The Wages of War: How Abortion Came to Japan
World War II’s devastation of Japan, and the politics of the post-war American occupation, led to the Japanese Diet [parliament] passing the Eugenic Protection Law 70 years ago, in 1948. The law legalized abortion in Japan, with millions of Japanese children being killed in womb over subsequent decades.
The law also legalized a non-lethal but still violent and eugenicist practice: forced sterilization. This aspect of post-war Japanese life confirms the connections, so familiar to defenders of life, between ableism and violence.
Before the War
As she did with the history of abortion legalization, Tiana Norgren describes the history of forced sterilization in Japan in her work Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in Postwar Japan. Legal forced sterilization largely didn’t exist in Japan before the war’s end. Official government ideology favored increasing the country’s population and discouraged measures that might prevent births. Contraception and abortion were severely restricted during the 1930s and much of the 1940s.
Eugenicists made multiple attempts to pass a sterilization law during this period, partly inspired by Nazi Germany’s policy. These efforts failed in the Diet, however, in the face of opposition from people of different ideological bents. Some opposed sterilization because they favored the state’s official “Give Birth and Multiply” stance, and others opposed it because they thought limiting population would distract from redistributing resources within the society.
The eugenicists came close to victory in 1940, when the Diet passed the National Eugenics Law. The law allowed sterilization for people who had various broadly defined illnesses or disabilities and whose children were likely to have these conditions. The law also allowed people judged not of sound mind to be sterilized on the consent of their parents or spouse—and contained a general clause allowing for sterilization without “the necessary consents” if such an operation was necessary “for the public good.”
Yet this general involuntary sterilization clause was never enforced during the remaining war years. Only about 500 voluntary sterilizations were carried out during the remaining war years and immediate post-war years.
Post-War Eugenic Law
The economic hardships of the post-war years increased Japanese politicians’ interest in population control. The Eugenic Protection Law of 1948 made forced sterilization fully a reality. The law allowed for voluntary sterilization under broader conditions than the wartime legislation, and also included crucial new provisions. Under the new law, applications for sterilization could be made not only by those desiring the procedure for themselves but by physicians who found someone has certain conditions and judge “that in order to prevent hereditary transmission of the disease it is necessary, for the public good, to perform a eugenic operation.”
The conditions that could qualify someone for sterilization fell into five categories:
1) “hereditary mental illnesses”;
2) “hereditary mental deficiency”;
3) “serious hereditary psychopathic disorders”;
4) “serious hereditary physical ailments”; and
5) “extreme hereditary deformities.”
Hereditary mental illnesses were defined as schizophrenia, manic-depression, and epilepsy. Hereditary mental deficiency was defined by vague concepts such as “seriously abnormal sexual desires” and “serious criminal tendencies.” Serious hereditary physical ailments included conditions such as progressive muscular dystrophy and hereditary deafness or hearing impairment.
©ILO/Yoshihumi Ibata, Creative Commons license
The Eugenic Protection Law also had a general provision that a physician could apply to have someone with an unspecified mental illness or “deficiency” sterilized as long as the person’s spouse, parent, or other guardian consented.
A “Eugenic Protection Commission” with jurisdiction in a particular area would decide whether to grant the physician’s application to have someone sterilized. If the Commission granted the application, the person targeted for sterilization had two weeks after notification by the Commission to appeal the decision. However, an objection by the targeted person didn’t guarantee the sterilization wouldn’t be carried out.
American Reaction
The eugenic philosophy in the 1948 law bothered the American occupation authorities, several of whom voiced their concerns. Two years before the law’s passage, one occupation researcher expressed his alarm at eugenic ideas within Japan, which he claimed was “evidence of the profound hold that tribal racism still exerts over the Japanese people.”
The Americans could hardly throw stones, however: forced sterilization had been legally practiced in the United States for far longer than in Japan: in the 20th century, over 30 American states would allow forced sterilization. Over 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized in the United States between 1907 and 1964. People of color were overrepresented among the victims of this practice.
Whether because of the ambivalent American relationship with eugenics and sterilization, concern for population control, or a general desire not to interfere in Japanese politics, the American occupation authorities didn’t prevent the Eugenic Protection Law and its sterilization provisions from being adopted.
Damage Done
Thousands of forced sterilizations were carried out in Japan in the following decades, peaking in the mid-1950s. Roughly 16,500 people were subjected to such sterilizations during the years the law was in effect. Another 8,500 ill or disabled people were sterilized supposedly with their own consent, although subtle coercion may have played a role.
In one case, a 16-year-old woman working as a housekeeper was suspected of having a mental disability and was sterilized in 1963—not only without her consent, but even without her knowledge of what the operation was. When she discovered she had been sterilized, she recounts that “I went to Tokyo to see if I could get the operation reversed but I was told it wouldn’t be possible… They stole my life away.”
In another case, a 15-year-old woman, who may have suffered brain damage because of excessive anesthesia during surgery, was diagnosed with “hereditary feeble-mindedness” and forcibly sterilized in 1972. The woman’s sister-in-law commented that “When she was about 22 or 23 there was talk of marriage, but then when she said that she couldn’t have children then the person who had proposed to her said that they didn’t want to marry her.”
As draconian as the law was, doctors and officials occasionally went beyond it. Proper procedures for approving sterilizations weren’t always followed. The medical condition of the person being sterilized was sometimes falsified to fit the Eugenic Protection Law’s provisions. In an infamous 1965 case, a doctor castrated an institutionalized mentally ill boy without his parents’ permission.
Moreover, ableism could go beyond forced sterilization to forced abortion: about 60,000 disabled women might have been subjected to this practice because of the view that the disabled shouldn’t have children.
Disability Rights Victories
UN Photo/Jan Corash
Over the post-war decades, eugenics and forced sterilization provoked organized opposition from Japanese disability rights activists. These activists and feminists spoke out against the Eugenic Protection Law at United Nations conferences such the 1994 Cairo population conference and 1995 Beijing women’s conference, generating international publicity and pressure on the Japanese government.
Lawmakers set about reforming the law, consulting disability rights activists about the reform. These activists saw their efforts prevail in 1996 when the eugenic, coercive elements were finally removed from the Eugenic Protection Law—which was renamed the Maternal Protection Law.
Under the reformed law, sterilization required the consent of the person undergoing the operation and that person’s spouse, if any. The acceptable grounds for sterilization now became a threat to the mother’s life from childbearing or, if she already had multiple children, a threat to her health from child bearing. (Sterilization was also permitted if the person to be sterilized or the spouse had leprosy and was likely to pass it on to children—stigma and persecution of those with leprosy being a long-standing problem in Japan.)
Disability rights activists won a further victory later in the 1990s. Nichibo, a professional association of ob-gyns, intended to lobby for reforming the law to allow abortion in cases of “incurable and fatal” prenatal illness. Protests from disability rights groups led Nichibo to drop this idea.
Conclusion
Although the Eugenic Protection Law is now gone, the Japanese still deal with its legacy. Whether the government owes compensation to victims of forced sterilization has been the subject of recent debates and lawsuits. The woman mentioned above who was sterilized in 1972 sued the government this year, arguing that the Eugenic Protection Law violated the Japanese constitution. Other lawsuits have followed, and the Diet is currently working on a compensation package for forced sterilization victims, to be considered next year.
Whether the Eugenic Protection law will ultimately be judged to have been unconstitutional from the start remains to be seen. We can hope, however, that survivors of this injustice and disability rights activists will continue to overcome the ableism that made these injustices possible.
We should also, in studying this history, contemplate that Japan, which resisted eugenically motivated sterilization and abortion even when it was a militarist state allied with Nazi Germany, embraced it in the aftermath of wartime defeat and occupation by the United States.
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See Part 1: The Wages of War: How Abortion Came to Japan
For more of our posts relating to disability rights, see:
How Ableism Led (and Leads) to Abortion
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
This is an excerpt from ProLife Feminism: Yesterday and Today. The introduction was written by Mary Krane Derr.
Introduction
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)
Observing her father’s upstate New York legal practice, young Elizabeth Cady Stanton resolved to overturn the laws denying women control over their economic and family lives, even their bodies. The common-law doctrine of femme couvert defined a married woman’s personhood as incorporated into
Mary Krane Derr
her husband’s and thus civilly dead. Stanton married an abolitionist merchant. Like Lucretia Mott and others, she became inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft and disaffected by the anti-slavery movement’s hypocritical failure to include women as equals. Out of their discontent came the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Even while raising her seven children, Stanton fought for “the Cause”—as an editor of the Revolution, a traveling lecturer, a leader of the National Woman Suffrage Association, coeditor (with Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage) of the History of Woman Suffrage (Volumes I-III), and author of the controversial Woman’s Bible.
Stanton decidedly rejected the notion that maternity was women’s only creative power and that every woman had to be a mother. She exulted in her subversive vitality throughout pregnancy and labor, particularly when she had her first daughter:
I have never felt such sacredness in carrying a child as I have in the case of this one. She is the largest and most vigorous baby I have ever had, weighing 12 lbs . . . And yet my labor was short and easy . . . What refined, delicate, genteel, civilized woman would get well in so indecently short a time? Dear me, how much cruel bondage of mind and suffering of body poor women will escape when she takes the liberty of being her own physician of both body and soul!
To women-only groups, she insisted, “We must educate our daughters that maternity is grand, and that God never cursed it, and the curse, if there be any, may be rolled off.” For this she was called a “savage,” a charge she found ridiculous; among Haudenosaunee [Iroquois], childbirth was not deemed impossibly painful and debilitating. In the hope of “rolling off the curse,” Stanton addressed many subjects considered unfit for public consideration: the unfair denial of child custody to divorced women, the limits of patriarchal religion, the desirability of family planning, the suffering that the disease model of pregnancy inflicted upon mothers, and the dire economic and social conditions that compelled so many women to resort to prostitution and to such equally “degrading” (her word) practices as abortion and infanticide. As early as 1854, Stanton publicly called for women’s right to a trial by jury of their own peers in such situations. . . .
She found it “appalling to the highest degree” that “infanticide is on the increase to an extent inconceivable” not only in cities but rural areas like Androscoggin County, Maine, where “there were four hundred murders annually produced by abortion alone . . . There must be a remedy for such a crying evil as this. But where shall it be found, at least where begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of woman?”
Infanticide
from the Revolution, January 29, 1868.
The remarkable mortality among natural or illegitimate children is a topic agitating the Press very largely just now . . . The system of boarding them out for slow murder . . . is alarmingly on the increase among the well-to-do….It is impossible to shut our eyes to these facts . . . Where lies the remedy?
—NY Times
In the independence of woman. “Give a man a right over my subsistence,” says Alexander Hamilton, “and he has right over my whole moral being.” When the world of work is open to woman, and it becomes as respectable as it is necessary to happiness for women of the higher classes, as well as others, to have some regular and profitable employment, then will woman take her true position . . .
The strongest feeling of a true woman’s nature is her love for her child; and the startling facts in the above extract, multiplying as they are on every side, warn us that all things are inverted. Objectors cry out to us who demand our rights, and the ballot to secure them, “Do not unsex yourselves.” It is against this wholesale unsexing we wage our war.
We are living to-day under a dynasty of force; the masculine element is everywhere overpowering the feminine, and crushing women and children alike beneath its feet. Let woman assert herself in all her native purity, dignity, and strength, and end this wholesale suffering and murder of helpless children. With centuries of degradation, we have so little of true womanhood, that the world has but the faintest glimmering of what a woman is or should be.
Infanticide and Prostitution
from the Revolution, February 5, 1868.
Social Evil Statistics
The annual inspection report of . . . New York City and Brooklyn, gives the number of houses of prostitution as 523 . . .
—Sun.
Child Murder
. . . The murder of children, either before or after birth, has become so frightfully prevalent that . . . were it not for immigration the white population of the United States would actually fall off . .
—Tribune.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton with Susan B. Anthony
Scarce a day passes but some of our daily journals take note of the fearful ravages on the race, made through the crimes of Infanticide and Prostitution. For a quarter of a century, sober, thinking women have warned the nation of these thick coming dangers, and pointed to the only remedy, the education and enfranchisement of women; but men have laughed them to scorn. Let those who have made the “strong-minded” women of this generation the target for the jibes and jeers of a heedless world repent now in sackcloth and ashes, for already they suffer the retribution of their own folly at their own firesides, in their sad domestic relations. . . .
We ask our editors who pen those startling statistics to give us their views of the remedy. We believe the cause of all these abuses lies in the degradation of woman . . .
Wonder not that American women do everything in their power to avoid maternity; for, from false habits of life, dress, food, and generations of disease and abominations, it is to them a period of sickness, lassitude, disgust, agony and death.
What man would walk up to the gallows if he could avoid it? And the most hopeless aspect of this condition of things is that our Doctors of Divinity and medicine teach and believe that maternity and suffering are inseparable. So long as the Bible, through the ignorance of its expounders, makes maternity a curse, and women, through ignorance of the science of life and health find it so, we need not wonder at the multiplication of these fearful statistics. Let us no longer weep, and whine, and pray over all these abominations; but with an enlightened consciousness and religious earnestness, bring ourselves into line with God’s just, merciful, and wise laws . . .
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For similar posts, see:
Is it Too Late? 1971 Speech of Fannie Lou Hamer
Valentine Friends: Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass
To Save Humanity: What I Learned at the “Two Minutes to Midnight” Conference
by John Whitehead
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decided earlier this year the organization’s index of probable nuclear and other dangers facing humanity. Tensions between the United States and nations such as North Korea, Russia, and China, among other factors, prompted the Bulletin to move the Doomsday Clock’s hands to two minutes to midnight—“midnight” representing apocalypse. The current status is the closest the clock has been to midnight since 1953, during one of the coldest periods of the Cold War.
The Doomsday Clock’s status, and the underlying threat of nuclear war it reflects, provided the title and motivation for the day-long conference “Two Minutes to Midnight: What We Can Do to Prevent Nuclear War,” co-sponsored by the Consistent Life Network. Held at Goucher College in Baltimore on November 17th, the conference had an array of co-sponsors (including Consistent Life member group Rehumanize International). The organizations Prevent Nuclear War-Maryland, Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Maryland Peace Action Network, as well as the Peace Studies program at Goucher, played the central role in organizing the event. The conference’s talks and workshop examined the current nuclear danger and various strategies for countering it.
I found the event a sobering experience. Conference speakers made clear how dangerous the current world situation is. Many different international flashpoints could ignite a nuclear exchange. Current political trends are towards worsening international relations and fewer controls on nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, peace activists can focus their energies on some specific steps to lessen nuclear weapons’ threat. Speakers and workshop leaders identified several initiatives for activists to pursue.
Current Dangers
The morning plenary speakers were Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, and Dr. Ira Helfand, the co-chair of the Nuclear Weapons Abolition Committee of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Their talks provided an overview of how nuclear weapons might be used and what the consequences would be. The most obvious sources of danger are the United States’ hostile relationships with Russia and North Korea.
Daryl Kimball
Kimball noted that the United States and Russia are on the verge of a major nuclear arms race. The from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which abolished a whole category of nuclear weapons. Although the United States hasn’t yet formally withdrawn from the treaty, Kimball predicted (in a later workshop) that it soon would and that the INF Treaty is now probably unsalvageable. Activists should instead focus on saving the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that limits American and Russian nuclear arsenals. START needs to be renewed by 2021, but . If START lapses, then American and Russian nuclear weapons will be almost entirely unregulated and an uncontrolled arms race could result. Current US plans to spend upwards of $1 trillion on nuclear weapons over the next 30 years only add to the risk of an arms race.
The situation with North Korea is somewhat better, with fears of nuclear war having slightly lessened following the Singapore summit between President Trump and North Korean ruler Kim Jong-un. Kimball commented, though, that progress has stalled as both sides wait for the other to take the next step.
Ira Helfand
Helfand’s talk identified other, less-publicized threats. US-China relations are now the worst they have been in 40 years, with the two countries sparring over trade and their militaries veering toward confrontation in the South China Sea.
Further, another conflict that doesn’t directly involve the United States threatens nuclear war. India and Pakistan, which have around 300 nuclear weapons between them, have fought four wars with each other and continue to have a very tense relationship.
More general dangers, not limited to specific countries, also exist. Global climate change could stir up conflict as people compete for stressed natural resources. Nuclear terrorism is also a possibility—especially the danger of terrorists hacking into nuclear-armed nations’ command and control systems to trigger a nuclear exchange.
Helfand also described a nuclear exchange’s consequences. Despite the vivid testimonies and records from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, he emphasized that these don’t prepare us for the destructive power of contemporary nuclear weapons. Using even a relatively few nuclear weapons—in an India-Pakistan war, say—would cause worldwide climate disruption and a . Such a “limited” nuclear war would still mean the end of civilization as we know it. A full-scale nuclear world war would be beyond imagining, with 300-350 million killed in the first day and climate effects causing a new ice age.
That we have avoided such catastrophes for over 70 years is largely a matter of luck—hardly a reliable basis of humanity’s long-term survival. (The same day as the conference, Dr. Helfand published an op-ed for CNN that covered some of these same issues.)
Future Steps
The current dire situation requires action. Several different practical steps for lessening nuclear threats came up during the conference. These steps fall into three broad categories:
Lobbying lawmakers.
The US Congress can take several positive actions, some of which have already been proposed as legislation. As already noted, . Others are changing US nuclear policy (“”), preventing the president from , prohibiting the development of that are more likely to be used, or generally . The status of these measures will be updated when the new Congress, which offers some hope for constructive action, convenes in 2019. Peace activists and organizations can focus their energies on advocacy for them, through emails, phone calls, and—most effective of all—face-to-face meetings with their representatives and senators.
Defunding nuclear weapons.
Ray Acheson
During her plenary talk, Ray Acheson of Reaching Critical Will and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), described the Don’t Bank on the Bomb project. Don’t Bank on the Bomb provides information on which financial institutions do or do not invest in companies involved in nuclear weapons production. Activists can use this information to campaign for banks and pension funds to divest from nuclear weapons production. Such campaigns not only deprive nuclear weapons companies of funds but also create stigma against producing these weapons.
Raising awareness.
Despite growing dangers, anti-nuclear activism hasn’t yet achieved the necessary popular urgency and visibility. Activists need to inform people, whether through talks, movie screenings, op-eds, letters to the editor, or sharing facts through social media. A specific law, treaty, or policy proposal can serve not only as a focus for action but a springboard for talking about the larger issues involved. The new United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which ICAN played a crucial role in creating, is one example: Consistent Life has frequently held vigils outside the White House on behalf of the treaty. The policy program of the Back from the Brink campaign, to which Consistent Life and other conference co-sponsors belong, is another. Back from the Brink had a notable success in Maryland when the Baltimore city council passed a resolution endorsing its program. Peace-minded organizations can also join the Back from the Brink campaign as endorsers.
Sobering yet Encouraging
As I said, the conference was sobering, given both the extreme danger from nuclear weapons and the amount of work still to be done. Yet I also left encouraged. The urgency and clarity of the cause motivates me to do more. The present situation requires us to act on behalf of a just and noble cause: to save humanity.
Note: Video of the Two Minutes to Midnight plenary talks and some workshops are available for viewing on YouTube.
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For more of our posts on nuclear weapons, see:
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons / Karen Swallow Prior
Rejecting Mass Murder: Looking Back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki / John Whitehead
The Reynolds Family, the Nuclear Age and a Brave Wooden Boat / Jessica Renshaw
Gendercide: Millions of “Missing” (Dead) Women
The Gendercide Awareness Project held an art exhibit at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, November 1-7, 2018. Here are photos taken on site by the Consistent Life Network’s vice president, Rachel MacNair.
The description is “a floor-to-ceiling maze that fills almost 2,000 square feet. As visitors pass through, the density increases and the passage narrows, blocking visibility and creating an uncomfortable claustrophobic effect. . . . Arguably, gendercide is the largest atrocity the world has seen, yet few people have any idea of its scale.”
Rachel MacNair
Rachel confirms that she was in tears after going through the exhibit. She’s pictured here in a somber mood before she started to walk the maze.
These charts come from the Gendercide Awareness Project website:
My Personal Journey on Veganism, War, and Abortion
by Frank Lane
Frank Lane
I’ve been an ethical vegan for about 28 years and a vegetarian for 16 years before that. My passionate conviction came from a profound sense of the sacredness and wonder of my existence, the natural world, especially the unborn, animals, and trees.
I was a registered conscientious objector to war and refused to kill when asked by my country. But on the flip side of that principle, I am a black belt in martial arts, where I learned how to severely protect by force for those that could not protect themselves.
This may sound like a dichotomy of principles, but I think not. A soldier will give his/her life or take life, for the greater good based on principle. It is our principles that determine our ethics.
When I am fighting for the greater good, I become my principles.
At 16, I broke away from the whole of the war machine and became part of the whole of the peace movement. I became an individual part of bringing peace to a warring world. This is when my principles started to fall into place, especially the first time I was told, “Meat is Murder.” I was stunned by the inference that one could be thought of as a murderer for killing animals.
I had to consider deeply how my act of contributing to the slaughter of millions of animals a day was affecting peace on the planet and in my soul.
When I was called for military service, it turned my world upside down, because I was being asked to kill my unknown brothers and sisters.
The killing of babies or veal calves or the Holocaust of Jews and the disabled demonstrate a lack of reverence for life. When we lose our respect for the sacredness of life, as in the case of viewing those with disabilities as having less value than other life, we break the link with the holiness of life. Living this honoring of the sacredness of life makes us spiritual beings.
In a public demonstration, activists gathered thousands of baby dolls, poked holes in them and painted them blood red to mimic an aborted baby. They then threw them like garbage onto the lawn of the White House to depict only one hour’s worth of aborted babies.
To add insult to injury, the activists demanded in jest that at least the abortion industry should organize a system to gather the aborted and process the carnage for animal food! This was done to draw a parallel to using the body parts of Holocaust victims for other purposes, such as using their bones for bone china or needles.
When anyone becomes aware of the suffering, it is an opportunity for personal growth. But at the same time we can close our eyes in denial. This is especially true when we experience a level of awareness and compassion for the bloodbath horrors of torture, agony, and suffering of animals, babies in the womb, or those in concentration camps. Our participation, however removed from these acts of abject torment, makes us cogs in the machine of mass murder.
I found solace in the notion that “All Life is Sacred,” bringing me to peace with a respect for all life. So when I was asked to take another person’s life by my country, I knew this was the most significant demand ever placed on me. My answers come from the highest respect for life, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”
So, with that notion in mind, I took a college ecology class to learn how to save the world. I was shocked when the professor told us to go out and kill an overpopulated species to balance out the “ecology.”
Here was the hard and determining test for abortion; when the life of the mother was at peril and an abortion became a medical necessity. This gives perspective on how to decide on the issue of taking life for the greater good.
The underlying guiding morality became clear: all life is sacred, and worthy of respect, even when killing is required. The American Indians honored the animals they killed for survival with great reverence. The word “survival” is the operative word that we must consider in these moral decisions.
We must ask: does our existence depend on the killing and suffering of animals? A soldier, doctor, politician, and butcher, all kill with a level of discernment. There are rules and regulations to our moral ethics of killing that appease our conscience.
One only needs to watch the horrific terror animals go through in a slaughterhouse to see unspeakable horror. Babies are stolen from their mothers, raped to become pregnant, left shaking with fear from the smell of blood and by hearing the cry of other animals. There is nothing more frightening than this holocaust of torture, pain, and suffering. If this living hell had to have glass walls, it would never exist.
Abortion has become as common and acceptable as destroying the environment for hamburgers.
Abortion is the original “Inconvenient Truth.” Without compassion for all life, we limit our spiritual convictions. Just as all things are connected, so is our compassion to every creation of life.
Your level of awareness will dictate your behavior. Your spiritual awareness will dictate your spirituality. It was this awakening that led me to honor the sacredness of life and a non-violent diet. That same awakening from ego, selfishness, lack, and fear turned my heart to the sanctity of the unborn.
There is a time to live and a time to die. As an ethical vegan and person of faith in the sacredness of all life, I find this awareness trumps all other conditions, leading my soul to seek a congruency for the honoring of creation for myself, others, the animals and planet.
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For more of our blog posts that include veganism as a concern, see:
Beyond the Human – Plus Everyday Peace Actions
Parallels of Veganism and Prolife-ism
Movies with Racism Themes: “Gosnell” and “The Hate U Give”
by Rachel MacNair
A note at the beginning of the movie Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer lets us know it’s based entirely on court transcripts and eyewitness accounts, being as true to events as a movie can attempt. The Hate U Give, on the other hand, is fiction. Yet it’s clearly based on actual events currently in the news – U.S. police killings of unarmed African Americans. Both show the nuances and complexities of real life, and of racism.
The title of The Hate U Give has an acronym: T.H.U.G. The full phrase is: the hate you give fouls everyone up (non-swear-word version). The movie is an excellent illustration of the point, which comes up frequently.
The theme of racism appears early in Gosnell, because in addition to all the sensitivities of investigating an abortion doctor, Kermit Gosnell is black. So is there a racist component in picking on him?
Yet it’s made clear in the movie (in a point we reported when this case became a major news story) that Gosnell put white women upstairs under more pleasant and professional circumstances. It was black and brown women who were selected to be in the most horrifying conditions of his facility.
The revolting state of his abortion practice, as well as his house where the basement was flea-infested, may puzzle many. But my own studies in psychology give a possible explanation: he was emotionally numb and detached from other people as symptoms of being severely traumatized. Killing people is traumatizing, and I’ve found this across all different forms of killing (including abortion, war, executions, police shootings, and criminal homicide). Gosnell’s behavior while being investigated shows these particular symptoms in abundance.
His behavior also portrays a difference between Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS), a form of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and a more recent concept: Moral Injury (MI). MI has the advantage of covering much more by way of symptoms, since it includes substance abuse and spiritual struggles. But it has a major restriction, one that helps explain why it arose in military veteran therapist circles and is primarily applied there. It requires, in the case of an act of killing, that the killing is seen by the person doing the killing as something he or she did wrong. Most violence, including what soldiers are expected to do, is done by people quite sure that what they’re doing is right. That keeps the MI label from applying. That label certainly didn’t apply here, as Gosnell declared he wouldn’t take a plea deal because he had done nothing wrong.
Thinking the violence is justified also applies in the case of police shootings. The racism in The Hate U Give is obvious, since it’s the reason why a young man reaching for his hairbrush was mistaken for someone reaching for a gun and shot dead. The idea of justifying the shooting on the idea it could have been a gun was exposed as racist: another cop confirmed that had he been a white man, the same behavior would have brought a yelled instruction to move away from the car, rather than a shooting.
The subtlety that racism can have was also on display: among the white students who walked out of school in a Black Lives Matter protest were those gleeful that they could now miss a chemistry test. This naturally distressed the black heroine of the movie, who’s also a student at the primarily white school. She was in the passenger seat at the time of the shooting, and the victim was a childhood friend of hers, so of course her sense of trauma was intense. But when one of her white friends expresses sympathy for the white officer having to go through family and job troubles and stigma because of the shooting, the underlying racist assumptions become clear to the audience. The white student herself can’t see them.
So both movies offer insights on the current problems of racism in U.S. society, and they both end positively with the immediate problem dealt with. Yet neither one addresses the far more permanent and society-wide solutions. For Gosnell, that’s making abortion unthinkable. For The Hate U Give, community policing is a major alternative. If police officers and the communities they serve have frequent friendly interaction, the officer is far less likely to say the racist things that, in this case, made the interaction far more tense than there was any reason for – the stop was only for failing to signal when changing lanes. Nor would the officer be so freaked out about a fellow reaching into his car if he’d conversed with the same fellow just last week.
Among those who favor abortion availability, their proposed solution is to have upstanding places such as Planned Parenthood available as an alternative to such back-alley practices. This ignores the fact that PP was quite available all through the years that Kermit Gosnell operated and didn’t seem to have stopped him; it was the court case that stopped him. And he would have been stopped earlier if the state of Pennsylvania weren’t deliberately ignoring health code violations inflicted on his non-white clients. Also, another movie is on the way to address this proposed solution: on March 22, 2019, the movie Unplanned, based on Abby Johnson’s book of the same name, is due out. It tells Abby Johnson’s story of having been Planned Parenthood facility manager who left and joined the pro-life movement. Abby showed us some clips at the Sidewalk Advocates for Life conference, and it promises to be an excellent follow-up to the Gosnell movie in showing that “reputable” abortion centers aren’t the solution to unreputable ones.
The Hate U Give is a movie that came out around the same time as Gosnell, which is why it was chosen for comparison. There are many excellent movies on themes of lethal aspects of racism (for this year, BlacKkKlansman also deserves a mention). There have been many throughout the years and will undoubtedly be many more.
I think Gosnell should also be in that category. It was ranked #10 in audience size on the weekend it came out, but I had to travel way across town to find a theater showing it. I normally walk to the movies I want to see. So it didn’t get the kind of coverage most other movies do. But it shows a case where abortion is one of the lethal impacts of racism.
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For more of our posts on movie and television reviews, see:
Hollywood Movie Insights (The Giver, The Whistleblower, and The Ides of March)
Hollywood Movie Insights II (Never Look Away, The Report, and Dark Waters)
Jasmine, Aladdin, and the Power of Nonviolence /
The Darkest Hour: “Glorifying” War?
The Message of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”: Abortion Gets Sexual Predators Off the Hook
For more on lethal racism, see:
Historical Black Voices: Racism Kills
How to Move from Theory to Practice: Reading “A Consistent Life”
by John Whitehead
Mary Grace Coltharp
Let’s say you’ve succeeded in winning someone over to the consistent life ethic. This person now wants to defend human life against abortion, the death penalty, euthanasia, war, and the myriad other threats to life. Now the question arises, “What should I do to promote the consistent life ethic?” A valuable new resource is now available for such a budding activist: A Consistent Life: The Young Advocate’s Guide to Living Peace & Justice Daily by Mary Grace Coltharp and Aimee Murphy, published by Consistent Life Network member group Rehumanize International.
Aimee Murphy
The authors, an intern for Rehumanize and the group’s executive director, respectively, carefully lay out a full year’s worth of study and activities to deepen someone’s commitment to advancing the consistent life ethic. Although aimed at students and other young people, the guide is useful for anyone trying to do consistent-life-ethic work in their community.
The book has 52 chapters, for each week in a year, with each week dedicated to exploring a different aspect of the consistent life ethic. The authors write about these different aspects of the ethic in an admirably positive way. Rather than presenting the week’s theme as opposition to a particular injustice, each theme is presented as recognizing the humanity of a different vulnerable or oppressed group—“re-humanizing” those who are too often dehumanized. Each week’s theme begins with the introductory phrase “Who you will rehumanize:” with the focus of this rehumanization including groups such as “human beings at the embryonic stage of development,” “human beings who are or have been incarcerated,” “human beings victimized by human trafficking,” or “elderly human beings and those living with terminal illnesses.”
For almost every week, the authors have identified five different activities by which guide users can deepen their commitment to the relevant group. These activities are nicely balanced, combining direct service to those at risk from violence, lobbying for laws and public policy, learning more about these issues, and raising awareness. The guide also frequently encourages artistic expression. In the section “Who you will rehumanize: human beings living with mental illnesses,” for example, the week’s recommended activities are:
- Look into organizations to see where you can volunteer and how you can help. Some organizations to look at are: National Alliance on Mental Illness, Suicide Prevention Lifeline, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Suicide Awareness Voices of Education.
- Write a song. Be creative and express yourself and the issues of mental health stigma or something else related.
- Find a song, share, discuss. Try to find something with a positive message, maybe about getting help if you need it.
- Look into how the government, state or federal, funds mental health care. Is it enough? Can it be improved? How?
- Call or write a government official about improvements. Maybe the Department of Health and Human Services could be doing more. You don’t have to know everything about an issue, just demonstrate that this issue matters to your representative’s constituents.
Activities under rehumanizing “human beings victimized by racism” include “Re-evaluate yourself and your thinking. Think seriously and don’t write off racism as not affecting you” and “Research influential court cases within the topic of America’s long battle with and fight for equal rights.” Activities under rehumanizing “preborn human beings and their parents” include “Invite your pro-life friends over to create handmade signs for a march for life” and “Volunteer with a [pregnancy resource center.]” Each week’s activities are also carefully structured, with the most challenging activity coming at the end of the week.
An aspect of the recommended activities that is particularly thoughtful and welcome is the frequent inclusion of self-care activities such as “Today take a bath or nap to rejuvenate” or “Rehumanize yourself. You could read a heartwarming story that will lift your spirits.” Quotations from notable people such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the anti-death penalty activist (and Consistent Life Network endorser) Sister Helen Prejean are also interspersed throughout the book. A list of recommended reading and viewing appears at the end, with the Consistent Life Network’s book Consistently Opposing Killing included among them.
The guide will be a valuable resource for student organizations, faith communities, and other groups that want to promote the consistent life ethic in their communities. The diverse array of topics covered and the broadly defined activities allow different groups to develop their own unique activism that emphases the issues most relevant to them and their communities. The guide allows for such flexibility to the extent of leaving the book’s final week of activities blank: activists can decide for themselves which theme and activities to pursue that week.
I would offer a couple minor criticisms of the guide’s treatment of war. In keeping with Rehumanize International’s mission statement opposing “unjust war,” the guide refers to rehumanizing “human beings impacted by unjust wars.” The term “unjust war” is a controversial one within the consistent life ethic movement, as pacifists would reject the qualification “unjust” as implying war ever could be justified. Acknowledging and addressing this philosophical diversity within the movement would have been helpful.
Further, even if one accepts the concept of “just and unjust” wars, the book offers little information or guidance on how an activist should determine whether a particular war is unjust. A quoted passage reviewing two Just War Theory principles is certainly welcome (not least because it is a quotation from something I wrote!) but a full account of Just War Theory is lacking. Should the guide have a future edition, a summary of Just War Theory principles or a reference to resources that provide such a summary would be worth including.
These are quibbles, however. A Consistent Life is generally an excellent resource for consistent life ethic activists wishing to translate their convictions into practice. It deserves a wide distribution and readership.
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For more book reviews on our blog, see:
A Way Beyond the Abortion Wars? / reviewed by Bill Samuel, book by Charles C. Camosy
Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-life Movement Before Roe v. Wade / reviewed by Carol Crossed, book by Daniel K. Williams
The Tragedy of Carrie Buck: A Review of Imbeciles / reviewed by Mary Lou Bennett, book by Adam Cohen
The Impact of Abortion on Child Abuse
by Rachel MacNair
Here’s the reasoning for an assertion that abortion availability helps reduce child abuse:
- Abuse can be caused when children were born unwanted and are therefore resented.
- There may be fewer births in those groups most likely to engage in child maltreatment.
And here’s the reasoning to think abortion availability helps increase child abuse:
- It removes a taboo on hurting children.
- It leads to children being treated as consumer product, rather than human beings, adding a requirement of “wantedness” that children shouldn’t have to meet.
And of course abortion may have no impact at all. But let’s look at the evidence to see which reasoning works best with the facts.
Types of Abuse
- Neglect.
That the children were never wanted – yet not placed for adoption – is one explanation for why they’re neglected.
Other possible explanations: parents are ignorant of what children need; are too self-absorbed to notice their children’s needs; were raised this way themselves; have an idealized view of having children without knowing what kind of work is involved; intended to have a baby but aren’t interested in the child that the baby turned into; substance abuse; or mental illness. These reasons call for interventions that have nothing to do with the availability of abortion.
- Physical abuse and emotional abuse.
This could happen when the child was never wanted – but not placed for adoption – and therefore her or his presence is resented.
It could also happen for the opposite reason: the child is super-wanted, but with unrealistic expectations. The child is supposed to follow the father into the family business, but shows no interest. Or is expected to be brilliant in math but is mathematically inept. The child is a real person who refuses to be perfect.
Also: the child is a scapegoat for other frustrations; the parents were raised this way and understand this is how it’s done; substance abuse; or mental illness.
Nevertheless, if unwantedness is one of the reasons, then abortion availability should reduce abuse in at least those cases involving undesired children.
- Sexual abuse.
In this case, it’s quite clear that unwantedness isn’t the problem – the children are “wanted” for the wrong reason.
The Rise and Fall of Child Abuse Rates
Focusing on the U.S.: Child abuse rates skyrocketed after the 1973 Roe v Wade decision legalizing abortion in all 50 states.
However, correlation isn’t causation. An alternative explanation is that it wasn’t that more child abuse was actually happening, but that people were more sensitive and reporting it more. Also, different criteria have been used to determine and measure abuse. Therefore, figures and rates aren’t always comparable.
Then, around 1990, the child abuse rates in the United States started a downward trend. At the same time, so did abortion rates.
The connection between the two may be coincidence, of course. The theory that abortion and child abuse are connected as two similar forms of violence would predict that lowering abortion would be associated with lower child abuse. But human behavior isn’t that simple.
When looking at outcomes for an entire society, there are all kinds of explanations. We can never know whether child abuse rates wouldn’t have been higher yet without abortion.
Still, evidence that abortion availability might have any kind of impact on child abuse rates requires more detailed study than merely the change in rates.
Studies: The Case that Abortion Helps Prevent Abuse
In a sample of unmarried mothers receiving welfare assistance, child abuse and neglect were associated with unplanned childbearing.
Two researchers used the varying times at which abortion became legalized in different U.S. states before 1973’s nation-wide legalization. Then they considered reports of child abuse, taking the children’s age into account to see whether abortion would have been available when they were conceived. Results suggest legalization lowered reported cases. Legal restrictions on abortion (as opposed to a ban), however, showed unclear results.
In a more targeted approach, there was a long-term analysis of fatal injury to children in states that have passed regulations such as parental consent, informed consent, and waiting periods. This found an association between such regulations and increased injury.
Studies: The Case that Abortion Helps Promote Abuse
But if abortion is violence, this suggests an even more targeted approach: are mothers who have abortions more likely to be abusive to their children? Several studies say yes; none that looks at this directly says no.
For example, one looked at women identified by Baltimore Child Protective Services. Researchers compared women with no pregnancy loss, those whose loss was involuntary (miscarriage or stillbirth) and those with induced abortion. The women with abortions were 114% more likely to be identified as having abused their children compared to either those women with no loss or those with miscarriages.
Then there is this question: what of children who rather than being unwanted are super-wanted?
In 1980 Edward Lenoski published a study of 674 children in an emergency room who were battered by a parent and compared them to 500 other children from the same emergency room. This showed:
- 91% of the parents of abused children said they had wanted the pregnancy; 63% of the non-abused said so;
- 93% of the parents were married at the time of the birth of the abused child; 60% of the non-abused were;
- the mother of the abused children began wearing maternity clothes at an average of 114 days into the pregnancy, as compared to an average of 171 days for the mothers of the non-abused children;
- The child was named after a parent (usually, the father’s name with “Jr.”) in 24% of the abused cases, but only 4% of the non-abused cases.
Since these are children for whom abortion was never contemplated, the role of abortion isn’t covered in this study. But the role of “wantedness” may, in some cases, increase rather than reduce the risk of child abuse
In those cases where the child is super-wanted, the ready availability of abortion could make things worse. It emphasizes the importance of the wantedness of children. Less abuse may accompany accepting children for who they are rather than for who their parents want them to be.
Sexual Abuse
Sexual abuse is a different category. The problem isn’t that the child’s unwanted, but is wanted for the wrong reason. See here for a study that reported a positive association of abortion access with sexual abuse.
There are many anecdotal cases of men who used the abortion clinic for the purpose of removing the evidence of their abuse. See, for example, this case from Feminists for Life.
The law requires reporting signs of possible sexual abuse in children to authorities. Pregnancy in a child qualifies as such a sign. If medical personnel follow the legal requirement of reporting suspected abuse, then abortion providers are in a unique position to prevent child sexual abuse and allow for its prosecution. If perpetrators knew this would occur, then it could have a powerful deterrent effect on sexual abuse.
Conversely, if medical personnel don’t report, then they facilitate the abuse. Adult men who expect non-reporting may be more likely to engage in such abuse. Abortion clinics tend to have a bad track record on this.
Conclusion
Any discussion of abortion’s impact on child abuse must specify which kind of abuse.
Sexual Abuse: There are solid grounds to think the ready availability of abortion is exceedingly harmful to efforts to prevent sexual abuse.
Physical abuse: studies that show abortion restrictions making the problem worse often rely on considering the population as a whole and focus on “wantedness.” Studies that show abortion availability makes the problem worse tend to focus on the parents of abused children.
Neglect: there’s a logic to the idea that a child who was never wanted isn’t paid much attention to, but then we have to ask – why abortion? Wouldn’t placing the child for adoption be every bit as much a solution? There are far more families wishing to adopt than there are babies available, so it’s an easily-available option.
Both physical abuse and neglect: those who assert abortion helps reduce such abuse have to note that the rise of abuse and abortion together and decline of both together, while it may still be explainable in ways that keep their assertion intact, at least show that massive abortion availability didn’t make a noticeable dent in reducing abuse. It’s just not as simple as: no child, no abuse. It’s complicated problem.
But the final point to note is really the most important of all: abortion is itself child abuse. A child is killed.
Editors Note: This is adapted from Chapter 13 of Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion. Please see that chapter for more references and a more thorough academic discussion.
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For more of our blog posts on the dynamics of violence, see:
The Redemptive Personalism of Saint Oscar Romero
by Julia Smucker
On the day before he was killed, Oscar Romero, who on Sunday October 14 will be officially declared a saint in the Catholic Church, delivered an impassioned plea to members of the Salvadoran army:
Brothers, you are a part of our own people. You are killing your own brother and sister campesinos, and against any order a man may give to kill, God’s law must prevail: “You shall not kill!” (Exod. 20:13). No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. No one has to observe an immoral law. It is time now for you to reclaim your conscience…. In the name of God, then, and in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise up each day more tumultuously toward heaven, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression![1]
Mural at the Universidad de San Salvador
The significance of this famous entreaty goes beyond the appeal to nonviolence: the audience his plea was addressing was as significant as its content. In this and multiple other homilies throughout his tenure as Archbishop of San Salvador, Romero not only preached against the violent atrocities being committed in El Salvador during that time, but did so by appealing to its very perpetrators as human beings. These heartfelt appeals reflected a commitment to the principle of redemptive personalism – rooted in the recognition of the indelible humanity of all human persons, even those who commit the worst offenses against their fellow humans – which has broad implications for opposition to all forms of violence.
Central to redemptive personalism is the recognition that behind every act of human violence, there is a human person with a human conscience and human moral agency. Romero’s fundamental belief that no human being is irredeemable allowed him to hold out hope for a change of heart (in Christian terms, a conversion) on the part of those with blood on their hands, and not merely as a matter of personal devotion but one of public persuasion. Aware of the broad reach of his homilies, regularly broadcast by radio, he sometimes used them to address directly those responsible for carrying out the military-led government’s brutal crackdowns, calling them to choose a different path. In one homily a few years before his death, he invoked the murders of two fellow priests who had advocated for human rights, saying,
Who knows if my words are reaching the person whose hands are bloody with Father Grande’s murder or the one who shot Father Navarro? Who knows if I’m being heard by those who have killed and tortured and done so much evil? Listen, there in your criminal hideouts! Perhaps you are already repentant. You too are called to forgiveness! [2]
Memorial Plaza at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles
These appeals to conscience were deeply intertwined with the personalist conviction that nobody is beyond hope. Furthermore, coming from a context in which following one’s conscience against an unjust order often required great courage, they carry a weighty reminder that conscientious objection is always an option for those who are asked to participate in violence of any kind. Even in situations where conscience rights are not recognized, nobody can be forced to act against their conscience if they are willing to suffer the consequences of refusing.
Urging defection is tactical as well as principled, providing a nonviolent means of fighting against violent repression by appealing to the humanity of those perpetrating it, and thus siphoning it away, person by person, at the very source of the violent acts. The effectiveness of this tactic, at least as a tangible possibility, is demonstrated by the fact that Romero’s appeals to obey conscience rather than unjust orders were seen as enough of a threat to cost him his life.
A sense of humanity as something broadly universal and deeply personal was the basis of much of Romero’s thought and action, and remains an essential part of his ongoing example. His appeals to conscience over violence made him a threat. His willingness to sacrifice his life for his convictions made him a martyr, and for Christians, a model of the faith in action. And his consistency in seeing the humanity of all – from the earliest stages of human life to its natural end, and still encompassing even those who have brought human lives to violent and unnatural ends – make him a model for living and proclaiming a consistent ethic of life.
2015, announcement the beautification in the Plaza Salvador del Mundo
References:
[1] Homily, March 23, 1980. Quoted in The Scandal of Redemption: When God Liberates the Poor, Saves Sinners, and Heals Nations, ed. Carolyn Kurtz (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing House, 2018), p. 13-14.
[2] Homily, December 18, 1977. Quoted in ibid, p. 44.
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For more of our blog posts on notable people in history, see:
Courageous Woman: Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) / Julianne Wiley
Celebrating the Life of Daniel Berrigan
Is it Too Late? 1971 Speech of Fannie Lou Hamer
Valentine Friends: Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass / Carol Crossed
Where Does Martin Luther King Jr. Fit Into the Consistent Life Ethic? / Rob Arner
The Referendum on Abortion in Ireland: The Violation of Rights
by Maria Horan
“The [Irish] State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”
Inserted into the Irish Constitution on the 7th of October 1983.
Voted to be removed on the 25th of May 2018.
Since the establishment of the independent Irish state in 1922, Ireland has always prided herself on her neutral stance. Ireland’s war-time neutrality, together with its former colonial past, has helped Irish soldiers work as peacekeepers around the world. Though Irish history has been steeped in blood, in recent years, Irish policymakers and activists have promoted peaceful negotiation. However, the rush to legalise abortion in Ireland negates the years of this hard work and indeed subverts the push for peace in Ireland, both within the whole island and internationally.
Violation of Irish Sovereignty
With the collapse of the Anglo-Irish Bank in 2008 (thanks to the mismanagement of the Irish government), Ireland was forced to take a bailout of 7 billion euros from the European Bank. The funds awarded to Ireland by Germany served to make the Republic even more vulnerable to the “groupthink” ideals of more powerful European nations. So it’s hardly surprising that Ireland is now beholden to the European Union and other pro-abortion global forces.
Ireland has excellent standards in maternity care, which means the country has served for years as an uncomfortable exception to the global claim that women are safer where abortion is legal. But this has been ignored by the international powers that be, as Ireland’s good maternal health challenges this erroneous but widespread belief. Now that Ireland’s pro-life example is about to be removed, global abortion advocates will be able to continue to attempt to spread the deception that women are safer where abortion is legal. In Europe, the only abortion-free countries that will be left are Northern Ireland, where protections for the unborn are under severe threat, as well as Poland and tiny Malta, both also threatened.
Violation of Irish Independence
In autumn 2016, my former university Women’s Studies lecturer, Ailbhe Smyth, marked the 100th-anniversary celebration of the Irish Rising against British rule by inviting the staunchly pro-abortion Ann Furedi of BPAS (British Pregnancy Advisory Service) to Ireland. Smyth, who later became spokesperson of the pro-abortion Repeal the 8th group, wanted to discuss how Furedi could help Ireland promote the abortion legalisation. Furedi’s views are radically pro-abortion: she supports abortion up to birth for any reason, including because of the child’s gender.
Ann Furedi
Furedi and BPAS hail from Britain, Ireland’s former colonizer. British colonial rule in Ireland included episodes of extreme violence and repression against the Irish. These include scorched-earth policies ordered by Elizabeth I, Cromwell’s massacres in Ireland, the Penal Laws, The Great Hunger (Irish famine of 1845-1851), and killings during the Irish uprising of 1916.
Clearly, the irony of inviting in a citizen of Ireland’s former coloniser to discuss how best to kill pre-born Irish citizens was completely wasted on Repeal the 8th. Thus, in 2016, a British abortion advocate was invited to Ireland, to instruct the Irish on how to kill their own. With the removal of the 8th Amendment, now there will be nothing to stop British abortion mill Marie Stopes (who have already expressed interest in Ireland) or Furedi’s BPAS in setting up clinics all around Ireland.
Violation of Democracy
Through the outcome of the Repeal vote, the Irish have foolishly handed over all autonomy to their government, allowing this small group of people to create any abortion laws they like, with citizens having no rights to object. And now, with a small but vocal number of abortion extremists in the Dáil (Irish Lower House of Parliament), this is becoming more likely to occur.
Abortion in Ireland will likely be available on demand, up to 12 weeks for any reason, and at taxpayers’ expense. The Irish healthcare system is already stretched to the limit, but Minister for Health Simon Harris chose to ignore the real health issues and plumped for abortion, clearly as a means to gain instant popular approval and future votes.
Meanwhile, predictably enough, now that abortion is to be legalised in Ireland, euthanasia is being discussed in the Dáil. Now that the pre-born Irish are disposable, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the elderly in Ireland are seen to be a burden as well.
Violation of Conscientious Objection
Ellinor Grimark and child
Since the voting outcome, conscientious objection of doctors has been systematically ignored. The abortion service to be rolled out in Ireland is the bizarre practice of GPs being expected to hand out the abortion pill to women 12 weeks pregnant and under. GPs were never consulted by the government about this and a journalist in the staunchly pro-abortion Irish Times paper has called on the government to force doctors to perform these procedures, thus echoing the inhumane treatment that midwife Ellinor Grimark had to endure in her native “progressive” Sweden, because of her refusal to participate in abortions. This is deeply disturbing and goes against international standards of conscientious objection, despite its continuous erosion, such as that of Scottish midwives Mary Doogan and Connie Wood in the UK.
Mary Doogan and Concepta Wood
It is completely unreasonable to expect family practice GPs to start handing out abortion pills and deal with the consequences if anything goes wrong. This is a malpractice suit waiting to happen. Both Harris and Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar have refused to listen to doctors’ objections to this, which is especially bizarre considering that Varadkar practised medicine before his political career. As one Irish doctor pointed out, GPs don’t have ultrasounds in their clinics, so they have no way to verify whether a woman is twelve weeks pregnant, which the planned cut-off line for the abortion pill clinic distribution.
The Truth Will Out
What now remains? There is still a strong pro-life movement in Ireland, many of whom became acquainted during the networking months before the referendum. Many Irish had become complacent about being pro-life, presuming that Ireland was safe from such violence, which is now sadly untrue. However, it is a chance for the Irish to stand strong, revive the movement and take back what has been lost by this generation. Those who voted ‘no’ behaved with integrity and can hold their heads high.
This will be challenging, as those opposed to the violence of abortion are already being treated with disdain and contempt, as reflected in the Irish media. However, it is really important that the work that needs to be done is carried out with dignity. Our day will come again. Truth will out. In the meantime, we need to be patient and continue to work with honour. We need to keep repeating the facts, again and again, until they are eventually heard.
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F0r another post on our blog from Maria Horan about Ireland, see Sinn Féin and the New Legacy of Violence.