PLC says National Women’s Council of Ireland no longer a “mainstream representative group for Irish women”

The National Women's Council of Ireland (NWCI) is the representative organisation for some women and certain women's groups in Ireland. They now support abortion at all stages. They can no longer claim to represent all women or all women's organizations. Last year they attacked Women Hurt for having the temerity to speak out about their own experiences of abortion. Now they're giving comfort to the most extreme element in the pro abortion movement in Ireland. I really hope that some of their member organizations let them know that they do not speak for them.

PLC says National Women’s Council of Ireland no longer a “mainstream representative group for Irish women”

27th September 2012

Speaking in response to a statement issued today by the National Women's Council of Ireland calling for abortion legislation, Dr. Ruth Cullen, Education Spokesperson of the Pro Life Campaign said;
"The NWCI can no longer call themselves a mainstream representative group for Irish women. Only last year the NWCI launched a scathing attack on Women Hurt,  for simply launching a billboard campaign drawing attention to abortion regret and the stories of women seeking hope and healing after abortion.
In citing public support for abortion today, it is interesting to note that the NWCI quoted a recent poll which made no distinction between necessary medical interventions in pregnancy and induced abortion which targets the life of the baby. Polls that do not make this ethical distinction are meaningless in the current abortion debate."

The same statement with some additional comment can be found here. 

Let's clear up a few things ...

Ireland has to legislate for the X Case ... yet there are huge flaws with this judgement. Ireland has to bring in abortion some European court told us after the ABC judgement ... well no actually they didn't. Don't take my word for it take the word of Dr Maria Cahill LLB, LLM, PhD.

The original article is available on the website of the Sunday Business Post but behind a paywall here. It has been reproduced on the Pro Life Campaign website here.

European court's abortion judgment not black and white

Dr Maria Cahill LLB, LLM, PhD

This article appeared in the print edition of the Sunday Business Post on 23rd September 2012

Anybody who claims, by reference to the decision in ABC v Ireland that Ireland is now compelled to legislate for abortion, arrives at their conclusion without much assistance from the judgment.
In fact, the court regularly uses 'mother' as a synonym for pregnant woman and 'her child' as a synonym for foetus. It rules that there is no right to an abortion under Article 8 of the European Convention, and, affirming its earlier ruling in Vo v France, holds that contracting states are entitled under the convention "to choose to consider the unborn to be a person and to aim to protect that life".
Acknowledging that there is broad consensus across the contracting states towards allowing abortion on looser grounds than those required by Irish law, the court nevertheless allows Ireland a broad margin of appreciation because there is "no European consensus on the scientific and legal definition of the beginning of life".
The judgment declares that protecting unborn life, as the Irish Constitution does by means of Article 40.3.3, is "a legitimate aim" and also "necessary in a democratic society" such as Ireland, where the majority of people value the right to life of unborn children. On this basis – that the Irish constitutional protection for the right to life of the unborn is compatible with the convention – the court rejects the claims of Applicants A and B.
Applicant C, the Lithuanian national, was in remission from an unspecified cancer when she became pregnant. Understandably concerned and fearful for her health, she searched online to assess her medical risks and travelled to England for an abortion.
She did not seek legal advice in Ireland and there are conflicting claims on the question of whether or not she consulted her oncologist after she became pregnant. (None of the facts of the case was proven, so this remains undetermined.)
The court ruled that Ireland was in violation of the convention for lack of "an accessible and effective procedure" by which Applicant C could have known her medical and legal position.
So, the take-home messages are that Article 40.3.3 of the Irish Constitution is compatible with the convention; that the prohibition on abortion is compatible with the convention, as the court confirmed by ruling against Applicants A and B; but that there is a problem of lack of clarity in cases where women face medical threats to their lives, as the court determined by finding in favour of Applicant C.
In order to address the lack of clarity that the court found to be problematic, we must therefore focus on the person in the circumstances of Applicant C; that is, on the woman who faces a medical risk to her life during her pregnancy.
While we cannot know exactly how the legal and medical professionals failed Applicant C because of the lack of evidence presented, we do know that Ireland is internationally recognised for the exceptional standard of care provided to women in the same position as Applicant C, and consistently ranks first or second in the world for lowest maternal mortality rates.
It is unquestionably the case that, had her cancer returned and had she sought treatment in Ireland, Applicant C's medical team would have acted to save her life, and her treatment plan could have included radiotherapy, chemotherapy, hysterectomy or any other treatment, notwithstanding that the unintended but foreseeable side-effect of such treatments may potentially have been the loss of her child.
The problem is then that there was no procedure that made this clear enough to her, with the result that she trusted her own Google-searched self-diagnosis, rather than trusting the care that she would have received at the hands of the medical professionals. Therefore, the clarification needed is that the current best practice two-patient model, whereby every medical effort is made to care for the lives of both mother and child, should be placed on a regulatory or statutory footing so that women in the circumstances of Applicant C can be assured that the medical care they need will be provided, to the highest international standard.
Still, those procedures are only useful if a woman has already entrusted herself to the care of a doctor.
For the sake of any other woman like Applicant C, who would turn in desperation to Google in order to self-assess her chances of dying, the Department of Health should initiate an information campaign highlighting that world-leading healthcare is provided to women and children as standard throughout pregnancy. It is an injustice to women such as Applicant C that our outstanding record of maternal health care is such a well-kept secret.
This approach does not necessitate giving legislative effect to the decision in the X case, which is legitimate because Applicant C did not argue suicidal ideation, and therefore her legal position is different to that of the woman in X.
Despite the great clarity with which Article 40.3.3 affirms that the right to life of the mother and the right to life of the unborn are "equal", the Supreme Court ruled in the X case that the right to life of the mother is "superior" to the right to life of the unborn which was labelled "contingent". This departure from the unambiguous constitutional position and the two-patient model it inspires resulted in the legal outcome that, if a mother threatens to commit suicide, the Supreme Court holds that she has the right to an abortion.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court reached this conclusion without hearing expert psychiatric evidence, nor could it have been aware of the huge volume of medical research which has emerged since and which shows that abortion is not a treatment for suicide, but may actually increase its risk.
Furthermore, in the X case there were no time limits placed on that right to abortion in case of suicide. Therefore, bringing clarity to the position held in the X case would entail legislating or regulating for an extremely liberal position on abortion – one that would allow all women who establish that they are at risk of committing suicide to have abortions right up until the moment they give birth.
Any temporal restrictions that the legislature would impose would be inconsistent with the X case, and would therefore add another layer of confusion to the current position, which is the exact opposite of what ABC exhorts. (To overturn the X case, and return to the original clear meaning of Article 40.3.3 which is expressly endorsed by the European Court of Human Rights in ABC, we could pass a constitutional amendment by referendum.)
Ultimately, since the European Court of Human Rights holds that there is no right to an abortion under the convention and that Ireland is entitled to protect the right to life of the unborn child, since the ABC case did not concern suicidal ideation, and since the X case does more to obscure than to clarify the legal position, the most reasonable, proportionate and effective way of responding to ABC v Ireland in order to afford clarity to those in the position of Applicant C is to regulate for the two-patient model – which is the current best practice in Irish hospitals and internationally celebrated.
Dr Maria Cahill is a lecturer in law at UCC

Pro Life Campaign National Seminar 2012

The Pro Life Campaign had its national seminar earlier today. The room was packed and people were treated to a series of great speakers. Not just Matt Mooney who I saw speak earlier in the week but also Dr Patricia Casey, Dr Berry Kiely, Caroline Simons, Professor William Binchy. Joe McCarroll and Cora Sherlock spoke on behalf of the Pro Life Campaign. The full story is found here.

99 Balloons

I always thought 99 (red) balloons was a rather cheesy song from the 1980s. Well it still is. At the same time, however, it is also the title of video that will bring a tear to even the hardest of hearts. I'm posting this here in this blog because I believe it to be very relevant to the discussion going on right now in Ireland. Matt & Ginny Mooney could have made the decision to end the life of their son Eliot before he was born, with his so called "abnormalities" he would never grow up to what the world describes as greatness. He was for his short life precious to them, more precious than if he won Olympic Gold and went on to lead his country.
 I went to hear Matt speak earlier tonight, the man has a great gift.

 

Not viable for life eh? Listen to Matt Mooney and learn differently. Check out the Mooney's blog.      

Sunday Times Poll

A poll appeared in yesterday's Sunday Times. It appears to say something like 80% of Irish people want abortion introduced. Of course as usual you get the response you want when you ask the right question. The question itself was flawed, it asked if people would approve of abortion in the case where a woman's life is at risk. As I've blogged before Ireland is a very safe place for women to give birth. Our constitution recognizes that pregnant women have a right to medical care, that they have an equal right to life with their unborn child. In a case where medical attention would heal the mother but have the unintended side effect of harming the baby's the mother always gets the care she wants.
In a statement the Pro Life Campaign's Dr Ruth Cullen puts it very clear:

This poll is fundamentally flawed and adds nothing to the debate because it fails to make the crucial distinction between necessary medical interventions in pregnancy to save the mother and induced abortion which targets the life of the unborn baby.

The unborn is a human being and worthy of protection

Fintan O'Toole is fairly typical of a class of person that exists in Ireland today. Opinionated, vocal, bitter against the Church, contrarian and most of all pseudo intellectual. He had an article, an opinion piece in last Tuesday's Irish Times. The actual article was laced with inaccuracies and fallacies. William Binchy, legal adviser to the Pro Life Campaign wrote an excellent rebuttal piece for the Irish Times. Among other points he says:

Using emotive language, he identifies the implications of recognising the equal worth and dignity of every human being: “Over the last decade, the equivalent of the entire population of Limerick city has been murdered. ... Of course, the premise which he is inviting the reader to accept is that the termination of the lives of unborn children should not be the source of serious concern because unborn children, on account of their immaturity, are less worthy of respect and protection. ... Yet the central human rights value – the equal worth and dignity of every human being – is rejected by Fintan’s analysis. Human beings in the early stages of their life, when they are at risk of abortion on a “right to choose” test, are in his eyes not human beings “in exactly the same sense” as Mandela.

I would like to reproduce the entire article here but newspapers are funny about that kind of thing so the original article can be accessed via this link.  I think Professor Binchy does a very good job at demolishing not just O'Toole's article but the entire pro abortion argument. He attacks it from first principle, that is to say, he makes us ask what is a human being and is it ever acceptable to kill one just because they are at an early stage of development. If we believe the unborn is a human person then they deserve to be protected as much as Mandela or Lady Gaga. If they are not a human person then Fintan needs to be honest and tell us when, in his opinion does human personhood start. I'd like to see him answer that, he may go gaga pretty quickly himself.
It's also worth noting that on the same night as that article appeared Vincent chaired a debate on the Vincent Brown Tonight show on TV3 about the topic of abortion. His partisan article was not mentioned but it was pretty evident from his grandstanding and hostile tone towards Rónán Mullen and Caroline Simons what side he was on. Despite this Senator mullen and Caroline Simons did very very well. The TV debate can be accessed here.

Kulturkampf.

Kulturkampf
Late 19th century Europe was not a very pleasant place for Catholics. Political activism by Catholics was discouraged, clergy were persecuted and very often exiled. The Minister for mis-Communications Pat Rabbitte said that it would be a regressive step if the Church dictated policy to the government. Pat Rabitte would much prefer that Unions would dictate policy. Pat was a union official back in the day and was well able to do that himself. He was president of the Union of Students in Ireland and later became an official and eventually National Secretary in the Irish transport and General Workers Union. Presumably he didn't dictate to Labour Party or other Ministers during his tenure, maybe they discussed the progress of the Mayo football team? The very language he uses is inaccurate and inflammatory. He seeks to poison the well as it were. 
Whatever your opinion on the Church it is still the moral guide for the vast majority of Irish people. Religious practice in Ireland is still high compared to many countries, more people go to Mass on a regular basis than participate in the political process. Far more people are Catholic and look to the Church for moral guidance than have ever voted for the Labour Party. The fact that someone would seek to silence such a large organization, one that plays such a large part in civic society is profoundly undemocratic. 
The Pro-Life Campaign weighed in fairly early, it's statement is below. 

Pro Life Campaign criticises Minister Rabbitte for attempting to suppress voices in abortion debate

27th  August 2012

The Pro Life Campaign has criticised the Minister for Communications, Pat Rabbitte over his remarks on RTÉ radio yesterday when he said he didn't welcome plans by the Catholic Church to play an active role in the abortion debate.
Cardinal Brady, the leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland said at the weekend that the Catholic Church would get involved in the abortion debate should the Government attempt to introduce abortion in the coming months.  In response Minister Rabbitte said ‘I would hope we’re not going to see a situation where one church decides to weigh into the campaign in the political sense.’
Commenting on Minister Rabbitte's remarks, Pro Life Campaign spokesperson Cora Sherlock said:
“No church, faith-based group or any group should be intimidated out of the public arena when it comes to commenting on public policy, particularly on an issue as fundamental as the right to life. I would have thought it was partly the role of any Minister for Communications to encourage public discourse on important issues not try to suppress it.”
Ms Sherlock continued: “In the same interview, Minister Rabbitte also misleadingly implied that women were currently being denied necessary medical treatments because of the absence of abortion here.  This is a total misrepresentation of the facts. Ireland, without abortion, is a recognised world leader in safeguarding the lives of women in pregnancy.”

Well said Ms Sherlock. This was covered in today's Irish Times with some reactions from less hostile politicians.