Child Came to Us, The

Human Life Review, Summer 2006 by Kenny, Mary

It was J.P. McFadden who said the inspirational words to me, back in the 1990s. "We didn't choose to take on this subject," he wrote. "The unborn child came to us. And we had to defend its cause." I have often reflected on this when the cause has proved trying, or difficult, or painful. And it has always sustained me.

The pro-life cause-particularly opposing abortion-is not, I would say, a particularly beneficial career move. In Britain, where I mostly live with my English husband (though I have retained a foot in my native Ireland), being pro-life is, somehow, shall we say, bad form. The English have a horror of "extremism" of any kind, and they imagine you are about to berate them with your "extremist" values. People seem to feel, too, that you are setting out to judge and chide them, or that you are unnecessarily bringing a private issue into the public domain.

The late Auberon Waugh-writer and son of the very great Evelyn Waugh-who was a vague sort of Catholic remarked to me: "Oh, why make a fuss about all that. An abortion is something anyone sensible wants to forget about." There is a truth in that affirmation, and it cuts several ways: It implies that anyone who takes up the pro-life cause is a standing reproach but it admits of the fact that an abortion is at best something horrible-that it is not, as the pro-abortion advocates would have it, a neutral choice that doesn't matter very much one way or the other. Yet one doesn't wish to be cast in the stern mould of John Calvin: It seems to me that the purpose of the pro-life cause is not to be a living reproach to anyone for past sins, but to endorse the value of human life from its inception, and to signal that this principle should be as much of a moral norm as any of the other human rights ethics which are so widely agreed upon.

In the world of the media, in which I have lived for most of my professional life, pro-life values are widely regarded with hostility, and it can become difficult, even for those of us who normally have access to the press, to publish anything about the subject in the mainstream media. After I wrote a book on the abortion theme, I was told by a leader-writer on one London newspaper (there are at least 12 national newspapers in Britain, all of them published in London, and read nation-wide): "Leave it out. You're a busted flush on this question." (Meaning, "Quit this issue"; "busted flush" is a gambling term for a broken or worn-out strategy.) On a BBC (the national British broadcasting corporation) radio programme I was informed that I was "obsessive" about abortion, although I had only mentioned it in passing, and it was relevant to the discussion. British Cosmopolitan magazine nominated me as "Misogynist of the month" after I published a piece on a pro-life issue. My response to some of these reactions has been to draw back from too much directly polemical engagement: You are no good to any cause if you are regarded as a scold or an obsessive. And it hurt being called a misogynist.

Actually, I had been a fiery young feminist from my early twenties, and was involved in founding a feminist movement in Ireland in 1970, the Irish Women's Liberation Movement. Another of my co-founders was Mrs Mary Robinson, who subsequently went on to become President of Ireland, and latterly, an important personage at the UN. The IWLM was a worthy cause in its time: It was, I now see, a modernising movement which necessarily brought antiquated Irish laws into the latter part of the 20th century. There were Victorian laws enacted by British administrations which had never been taken off the statute book; restrictions which barred women from taking out a checking account without the counter-signature of a man, or from applying for a mortgage (odd in that in Irish society women were often considered more responsible than men when it came to money-certainly less likely to spend it at the local bar): regulations which very seldom admitted women to jury service (enacted by the Irish Free State in the 1920s), laws which banned married women from working for the State (commonly applied in European countries in the 1920s and 30s, during catastrophic male unemployment), fiscal arrangements which in effect neglected widows and failed to support deserted wives, and, perhaps most controversially of all, a 1935 law which forbade the importation of contraceptive devices.

Similar anti-contraception laws had existed in France (from 1920 to 1967) and in the State of Minnesota. The "suppression of fertility," as the French called it, was culturally regarded as dangerous and unnatural, and particularly so after the horrendous loss of French population after the First World War. Nevertheless, by 1970, the Irish law was archaic, and an unwarranted intrusion by the State, to forbid the importation of condoms or the diaphragm once known as the "Dutch cap." And in our feminist movement, we had some fun with demonstrations and stunts against the outdated law.

Interestingly, our feminist movement did not, at that time, confront the issue of abortion. In our consciousness-raising sessions, we simply never spoke about it. Although a British law enabled abortion to be performed-with certain token restrictions-in 1967, termination of pregnancy did not really become a world-wide public issue until 1973, with the Roe v. Wade debates in America. I think there were a number of reasons why we, in the Irish feminist movement, did not discuss abortion. There was a natural, if unspoken, element of distaste. Irishwomen would be aware that there would be deep divisions among women, even among feminists, in what was still a profoundly Catholic country-and what was also relevant, an agricultural one. When abortion did enter the public realm of discourse in Ireland in the 1980s, a correspondent wrote to The Irish Times to say that the only time the word "abortion" had ever been heard among farming folk (which until recently constituted the majority of Irish people) was "when the cow had failed to calf." To agriculturalists, "abortion" simply meant "failure": and indeed material loss.