3 minute read
When hedonism takes over
Mary O’Regan laments the recent abortion referendum result in Ireland
“I don’t want a baby who is slow and will have me to blame for it,” Emer said when she finally had an abortion. Emer and her long-term boyfriend, Connor, had booked an abortion earlier on in the pregnancy but cancelled it reluctantly because two friends of mine convinced them to wait. The couple wanted to marry and have a family together, but this baby was a surprise. When they were partying in the early months of the baby's life they had not known the woman was soaking the young infant in glasses of vodka. The friends I have in common with this couple told them to make sure the baby was, in fact, harmed first, because they could be aborting a healthy baby. The weeks of pregnancy wore on and the couple had another scan which showed the baby was healthy, but they could not be assured the baby's intelligence had not been impaired by the mother's excessive drinking in early pregnancy, so as fast as they could they aborted the baby.
Emer and Connor are not the exception among young Irish people who abort their child. During the past 15 years I’ve done a great deal of crisis pregnancy counselling, and I have found that binge-drinking (which is an accepted vice in Ireland) plays a huge role, while contraception is the enabler. Some examples are painfully etched in my mind. The mother from Tipperary who dumped her 17 year old daughter on a street near an abortion clinic. The teen was in a cycle of drinking until she blacked out; her pregnancy occurred one of these times. Her mother felt she had done her best by putting her kid on the Pill, so the daughter “could have her fun”, but they never thought a child would result. Resolute, she did not want a grandchild who was pickled in alcohol, the mother said she wouldn’t speak to the daughter until after she had the abortion. Despite my best efforts, the daughter went through the clinic doors crying and whimpering like a new-born baby herself.
That said, it is not impossible to convince an Irishwoman out of abortion; a girl I know did the amazing feat of convincing a married woman not to abort a baby she had conceived when drunk, a baby who was not her husband’s.
Drink-fuelled promiscuity is modern husband-hunting for many in Ireland. After their first abortion, they drink more to numb their guilt, and then have a second abortion for the same reason as the first.
Contraception induces a state of mind where sex and the creation of a new life are seen as wholly separate. Whenever young people are trained to use contraception and emotionally blackmailed into being promiscuous, alcohol becomes a problem because, if there is no young life growing in the womb to protect, why not have as much of your poison of choice as you like? In Ireland, binge-drinking and contraception have allowed hedonism to take over, meaning ultimately a mutilation of youth because the most vulnerable young life must be snuffed out so that promiscuity and binge-drinking may continue. The life of the pregnant mother is marred by the psychological assault done to her by her peers, her parents and those who willingly dismember her child. The laughing crowds you saw on TV gleefully celebrating as abortion became legal in Ireland following the referendum in May, were raising a glass to a society that has had its conscience poisoned.
I may have become an outlier, joining the Latin Mass community and finding a different way of life from that of my contemporaries, but I have a shared history with the Irish young people who voted for abortion. I remember growing up in Ireland, knowing there were a few girls who were already binge-drinking. Had I joined them they would have been my friends because we would have had something in common – our drinking. But we were just 12. I chose not to be their drinking companions, but inevitably felt cut off from them as a result.
Post-abortion women in Irish society find it hard to break away from heavy drinking and repeat abortions because they feel they face the same choice I did in primary school; drink and have friends or abstain and be alone.
