Today is her birthday. Under normal circumstances I would have sent her a text from Leinster House, assuring her of all my love and support as she entered her sixteenth year and telling her that I would give her a big hug when I get home later tonight.
But I will never have that chance because our daughter was stillborn on the 23rd of March, 2002. With just seven weeks left in my wife’s pregnancy our little girl passed away and was denied her right to live her life, a life that I believe would have been filled with love, laughter and potential.
Wanting your child to reach their full potential, to live a happy and fulfilled life, is the very essence of what it means to be a parent. That is why I’m so deeply conflicted by the ongoing debate about abortion in Ireland.
While I fully support the holding of the referendum, I have yet to decide how I will vote. The more I reflect on what the outcome means for our country and its future, the closer I come to one particular decision.
Our country is quite unique in that our constitution recognises the right to life of our unborn children. In 2013 we passed a law ensuring that our doctors can carry out an abortion where a continuing pregnancy threatens the life of a mother.
Now we are being asked a far more fundamental question. Do we want to completely remove from our constitution all protection for our unborn children? For me this is not a question to be answered in the context of religious belief. It is far more serious than that.
I believe that it goes to the very core of who we are as a people and what we stand for in the 21st century.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is understandably the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. The preamble of that document, which sets the overall framework for the Convention, contains the words “the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth.”
Those words are a compelling commitment on behalf of all of humanity to protect the most vulnerable of our species. They reflect our deep and innate desire to nurture, love and protect our children, born and unborn. To deny our children that protection is to deny the very reason we call ourselves human.
The argument that an unborn child is to be denied any human rights, is in my opinion, scientifically and logically flawed.
In the first instance human reproduction sees the sperm and ovum merging to form a being that is not the mother and not the father but a completely new human, one that has never existed before, and one with the inherent capacity to develop to its full potential.
To end the life of a human being during pregnancy on the basis that it has not yet achieved a specified level of development is to ignore that a human being at that stage of human development is functioning just as it is biologically programmed to function. Put simply, that’s how we are made.
Secondly it makes no sense to conclude that a child in the womb has no rights whatsoever right up to the moment of birth but seconds later, having been born, it has every right one could wish for.
If we begin to erode the rights of our unborn children, we begin to unpick the threads of our societal fabric and see the emergence of a society that can arbitrarily decide who does and doesn’t qualify as equal.
Dr. Mildred Jefferson was the first African American woman to be accepted to Harvard Medical School. As a feminist and a doctor she saw the potential for abortion to badly destabilise American society and in 2003 she wrote;
“I became a physician in order to help save lives. I am at once a physician, a citizen, and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow the concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live”.
That is the decision we are about to make in Ireland. Do we remain a beacon of humanity in seeking to protect the rights of all children or do we join the others in condoning violence against some of our children. simply because they have yet to be born?
And that brings us to the question of those vulnerable women who feel that they have no option but to seek an abortion. How do we as a society care for them and protect their rights?
The argument that we already have abortion in Ireland and we should now legislate for it is simplistic and defeatist. Why not first establish the underlying reasons why thousands of women feel that they have no other option but abortion?
We have already evolved as a society that will never again tolerate the terrible injustice of our mother and baby homes. If a pregnant woman in 2018 feels that she can’t participate fully in society because of her pregnancy, then there is something fundamentally wrong with a society that pits her against her unborn baby.
Can we not evolve yet again to a place where all expectant mothers feel supported in choosing to have their baby? Our country is already one of the safest places in the world to have a baby. Yes we need to invest more in the availability of contraception, in better pre and post natal care, in counselling, childcare and education. That we should do without delay.
When I walk into my local polling station to vote in the referendum how can I forget the lost potential of my daughter? In removing the right of thousands of Irish children every year to reach their own potential, to live long and fulfilling lives, I would be dishonouring her memory and I just can’t do that.
There must be a better way, one that respects the rights of all. Let’s work towards that and set the example for others.