3 minute read
Saving Ireland’s Unborn
Mary O’Regan on a special case ofgiving
The one certainty in Siobhan’s mind was that if she didn’t have an abortion, she could not raise the baby herself. She already had one little boy and was barely coping. Her boyfriend of many years was in chains to an addiction and while they lived together, she was forever in a pattern of leaving the flat and going to sleep on a friend’s sofa because she didn’t want their son to be around his father when he was drunk and high.
Siobhan’s parents were less than impressed so they cut her off, withholding affection until she agreed to break up with her sweetheart-the-drunk which was never going to happen.
He was averse to marrying her. Most of her friends had fellows with drink problems and they didn’t leave their men, and it never crossed her mind to do so either. I knew of Siobhan’s crisis pregnancy because one of her friends knew me and was struggling to help Siobhan find away forward. Siobhan was desperately fighting against a temptation to have an abortion, the mere idea was hideously gruesome to her, but she was beginning to feel she had ‘no other choice’. Siobhan mentioned that she’d had previous pregnancies, yet I made the deliberate choice not to try to find out specifics.
I have helped pregnant women in crisis from all over the world and it is an essential step to ask them if they have had an abortion before and, if so, for what reason, and the majority of them have even said they were grateful to me for showing concern about their history. Not so with an Irish girl.
If an Irish woman is not going to tell the man with whom she is intimate about such things, to think she will tell you is folly.
A friend of Siobhan’s made a suggestion: ‘would you ever think of adoption? Think of the joy the baby would give a couple who can’t have kids of their own. This would be very generous of you.’
I would never have dared suggest adoption to Siobhan because in my experience to mention adoption in such circumstances is to risk hearing the words: ‘the baby will be abused!’ What a close friend could do, I could not. Siobhan became obsessed with the idea: there was a way to keep the baby alive and to allow for him to have a life she could not give him. I only helped from the sidelines by encouraging the friend to keep encouraging Siobhan towards adoption.
Siobhan’s friend’s words spoke to her heart. For the Irish girl it is a source of pride to ‘be the giver’ or ‘to do the generous thing’ and to get credit for good-heartedness by a most genuine act of selflessness in giving to another. Blindly pro-abortion as the young Irish often are, they still have this empathy for couples who cannot have a baby of their own, and yet they are contrarily oblivious to how their role in voting for abortion makes it ever more impossible for a childless couple to adopt.
But could Siobhan bear the pain of parting with her baby? With each passing month, she realized that she was the one person who would know pain, yet three people would profit immeasurably, the baby would have his life spared and a couple would know the immense happiness of calling him their own.
What I’m about to write may shock you but it is nonetheless true and the most telling detail of all: Siobhan and her boyfriend never discussed her pregnancy, and never talked about the baby going for adoption. Not once. To do so would have been to open the Pandora’s box as to her reasons for thinking him an unfit father and why his addictions made him a stranger to her.
Then there came a still, cold morning when Siobhan gave birth, patted his fluffy head, bathed his newborn face in her tears and gave him into the arms of another.
The Latin Mass Society has been organizing glorious Traditional Latin Masses in reparation for the Irish voting abortion into law, and I hope that sharing my experience will edify you and give you hope that Ireland’s young people may come to save their young.
