Choosing Life; As she prepares to open her new HQ, Sister Roseann

Sunday Herald, The, Mar 3, 2002 by Alan Taylor

I AM not a woman. Let me put that another way. I am a man. I often remind myself of this, especially in the morning when I'm attempting to scrape the stubble off my chin. It is an irksome chore, which I would rather avoid. The bleary-eyed face in the mirror nods in agreement but doesn't look totally convinced. True, shaving is a bore but in comparison with what women have to endure it hardly registers on the Richter scale. Take childbirth, for instance. I have been at the birth of two children - well, at least I was in the hospital at the crucial moment - and I wouldn't want to go through it again.

Women, of course, never know when to stop. They are gluttons for punishment, their own worst enemy, compulsive child-bearers, prototype people carriers. They must decide whether or not to have the baby that is growing in their belly. It's their choice, says the pro-choice movement, and nobody else's. Put that way, it sounds straightforward. Actually, it's anything but.

Often, expectant mothers are confused, afraid and lonely. Often, they're in a state of shock. Often they're desperate. Some are so desperate they'd rather take their own life than see through the pregnancy. The last thing many of them expected was to find themselves pregnant. The first thing they want to do is get rid of the baby. They want the pregnancy terminated. They want an abortion. They want to put their "mistakes" behind them.

Which is where Sister Roseann Reddy enters the equation. "Honestly," she says, "if I had a pound for every time somebody said to me 'But he said he loved me' I'd be a millionaire. I really would." Sister Roseann does not approve of abortion. To her, as a Catholic, it goes against everything she believes. Human life, she insists, is sacred, irrespective of whether it's inside or outside the womb. A person is a person from the moment he or she is conceived. To her, there is no room for negotiation, no shades of grey. "Women who are pregnant," she says, "don't talk about embryos and foetuses. They say they're having a baby."

It's five years almost to the day since the late Cardinal Winning announced his "bold, new initiative" to try to turn the tide of abortion. To him, it was an epidemic of global proportions. In America, it's estimated that soon, by the age of 45, nearly half the female population will have had an abortion. Last week the Pope warned that abortion, which he says is a crime against humanity, could "drive democratic regimes to transform themselves into totalitarian regimes".

Cardinal Winning's simple but controversial idea was to offer help to women who were thinking of getting rid of their babies. The more hysterical sections of the press labelled this "cash for babies". In turn, the Cardinal described abortion clinics as "gynaecological abattoirs" and warned that issues of "personal convenience" were now deemed sufficient to sign a child's death warrant. He said the daily abortion toll in Britain was the equivalent per day of two Lockerbie aircrashes, in which 270 people died. In Scotland currently around 12,000 abortions are performed each year.

Sister Roseann, who is 38 years old, had no idea the Cardinal was going to make such an announcement or that she would be the person he would ask to implement the Pro-Life Initiative. "It came right out of the blue," she says with a wry laugh. She is, as she says herself, larger than life. She talks nineteen to the dozen, amusingly, self- deprecatingly, practically, irreverently. On the wall in her office she has pictures of Winnie the Pooh and the Pope. She rather likes the association. One journalist compared her to Mother Teresa. Everyman made a film about her. She reminds me of another woman called Roseanne.

Like the Cardinal, she says, she does not judge and she does not suffer fools if she can avoid them. "I'm not swayed by emotion." Her underlying message to the women who come to her for help is that they must learn to help themselves. "I'm not responsible," she tells them. "You're responsible. We don't want to create a dependancy culture."

Though she'd worked for the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC), she had no idea what she was getting into when Cardinal Winning asked her to become involved.

"I don't think any of us, including the Cardinal, had any idea of how it was going to take off. We just didn't really know. It was amazing how it seemed to capture people's imaginations and capture the media's attention. And it's kept going for five years. We've never had to advertise yet. We have girls phoning us all the time. In fact, we're busier than ever. It is unbelievable."

Sister Roseann's HQ is a converted church hall at Crosshill in Glasgow. It is here that women come when they're looking for help. The centre will be opened officially this Saturday, when it will be blessed by Glasgow's new archbishop, Mario Conti. Relatives of Cardinal Winning will cut a ribbon, probably to a backdrop of bawling weans.