Catholic Church calls on Irish government to hold abortion referendum

By jaysus eiriamach if you had been opportuned to present that last argument of yours in front of Ireland’s Oireachtas committee on health affairs they would all have led you out to be locked up in the Dundrum asylum for the mentally-ill. Deliberate abortion is not a murder of a human-created, future human being????

Jacers, I assume that members of the Oireachtas are educated enough not to engage in petitio principii, as you do when you cavalierly claim that abortion is murder. Abortion is abortion, and if you wish to show that it is morally wrongful killing, i.e., "murder," you need to supply viable, empirically informed reasons that a person of any religious understanding -- or none at all -- can accept. Without that empirical warrant and moral reasoning, you're simply seeking to impose your church's teaching on state law. Your specialty is story telling and church anecdotes (you're quite good at these), but maybe you could give a try to logical reasoning for a change. Historically, the Irish have been good at that, as well as at narratives and religious ruminations.

Just out of curiosity, Gearoid, how large does the number of women who die from complications of pregnancy have to be before you consider it a legitimate reason for allowing doctors to abort such pregnancies to save the lives of women? About your mortality figures, we do not know how many dead Irish women are included in the UK figures, though it is likely that some who travel to the UK for abortions in problem pregnancies find that help too late to survive. Also, you're wrong about abortion rates increasing, at least in the USA (I haven't checked UK stats). Every measure tells us that abortion rates have steadily DECLINED in the USA since the Roe v Wade decision, and the alarming rate of maternal and infant deaths that preceded Roe v Wade dropped quickly and deeply immediately following that decision. Sex education, access to contraceptives, and access to safe, legal abortion explain those decreases, but opponents of contraception and abortion rarely mention these steadily falling rates of abortion and maternal/ infant mortality.

By jaysus eiriamach if you had been opportuned to present that last argument of yours in front of Ireland’s Oireachtas committee on health affairs they would all have led you out to be locked up in the Dundrum asylum for the mentally-ill. Deliberate abortion is not murder of a human-created, future human being???? I have often said that you twist truthful things around to suit your own agenda. You've done it again.

Eiriamach, I do not have to be an expert in Obstetrics to realize that doctors are fully empowered to save the lives of women and their children if possible through all necessary means and this is not wishful thinking. Again you extrapolate data from the small minority of extreme cases and try to use it in the general sense to make a case for the introduction of abortion in Ireland. To me, this is ideology at work and not medical necessity. You quote the "Irish Times" concerning figures which purport to contradict Ireland's very low rate of maternal maternity but this source is hardly a neutral one. Even with a maternal death rate(all tragic and regrettable and better if the rate was 0) of 8 per 100,000, it is still low when one looks at the 11 per 100,000(2006-2008 for UK. But the figure for Ireland has to be fully verified and when one looks at the causes of the 25 maternal deaths in Ireland between 2009-2011, one can see that the causes are varied and some are not directly attributable to the effects of pregnancies as such. To quote the "Irish Times" report- "Some 13 were indirect deaths – cardiovascular disease (five); suicide (two); HINI Influenza (two); epilepsy (two); chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (one), and bleeding oesophageal varices (one). Other deaths amounted to six – metastatic, or spreading, cancer (two); road traffic accident (one); CNS Lymphona (one) and substance abuse (two)." So it seems that pregnancy was not the direct cause of death in a large number of these cases as underlying medical conditions or external factors like car accidents played their part. As regards your point concerning any future Irish law on abortion not becoming abortion on demand, I refer you again to the British and American experiences which typify how abortion rates rise exponentially once a law enabling this terrible procedure is passed.

Rights with limits, Mortimer, is precisely what the Irish government is trying to devise. They cannot repeal the Irish Constitution's anti-abortion provision. But working within it, they are trying to make it possible to save the lives of women whose pregnancies are non-viable or who will die if their pregnancies continue. That is a narrow, minimal fraction of the human rights that women ought to have, and it is far, far distant from the ridiculous claim of "abortion on demand," which does not exist in the USA or any other nation I know of.

Vatican loyalists attempting to interfere in Ireland on behalf of their emperor in Rome.

No Jacers, you do NOT "have the right to choose to kill [your] next door neighbour." There are laws against murder, but abortion is not murder. Childbearing requires a voluntary sacrifice of one's bodily resources, one's freedom with regard to such things as food, drink, and personal habits, a commitment to pre-natal and later pediatric care, and a commitment to decades of child-raising in a loving, nurturing, safe, and minimally comfortable environment. If women do not have the right to choose when and whether to bear children, women lack an essential set of human rights and are, in effect, the child-bearing indentured servants of the state. That's a vastly different situation from your choosing not to murder your neighbour. You're confusing you approval or disapproval of women's choices with women's right to choose. That's a dangerous confusion because although you have the right to express your disapproval, you do not have the right to make another human being's choices for her.

Fine, Gearoid4, give your sermons of how to choose to women WHEN WOMEN ARE FREE TO CHOOSE! But to set yourself or the law up as the boundary of another person's free will is tyranny, abhorrently anti-Christian and inhumane. You have an aversion to the facts of obstetrics and invariably dismiss threats to women's lives during pregnancy. Even when pregnancy itself is not the threat to maternal life, it is impossible to treat the threat while the woman is pregnant-- undefeatable fact-- not refutable by wishful thinking. Therefore, it's standard practice in emergency rooms of hospitals around the globe, except Catholic hospitals, to abort in incomplete miscarriage and most other conditions I listed earlier. The Irish Times article "Savita's Law" notes that although the Central Statistics Office found 4 maternal deaths per 100,000 live/ still births for 2009, "experts here now say ... the rate is double that. The [WHO] defines a maternal death as:'The death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management but not from accidental or incidental causes.' According to figures in the Confidential Maternal Death Enquiry (MDE) in Ireland, Report for the Triennium 2009–2011, the maternal death rate here is eight per 100,000. Dr Michael O’Hare ... chairman of the Maternal Death Enquiry group, says the higher rate comes from far more thorough data gathering...."

Well said Gearoid4. @ eiriamach: that last post of yours is one of the worst I’ve seen from you. You come across as screaming mad trying to justify the unjustifiable, or "losing your marbles" as some would put it. I have free will. With that freedom, I also have the right to choose to kill my next door neighbour but that doesn’t make it right. >> Yeah, you’re right on my thousands of words typed on yr screens… Funny thing is that I am actually very quiet in company, preferring instead to listen more often than I speak; I recognise that God gave me two ears to listen with and one mouth to speak with, so I listen more than I speak. I also have ten working fingers which is probably why I type so much.

Women have free will, Eiriamach to carry out their own decisions, but free will has boundaries. A responsible, well-informed conscience know where those boundaries are located and this should come into play when decisions are taken during difficult pregnancies. A woman has a duty to protect her own life and also that of the fetus growing within her. You describe these medical crises in terms of the fetus being the ultimate cause of them and the only solution for you seems to be the destruction of the growing baby in the womb. Now if doctors can intervene in those circumstances and save both lives(without deliberately targeting the fetus/embryo)-would that be a favorable outcome for you? No right thinking person would deprive a woman of her right to life. But it is when ideology in terms of a blanket "right to chose" trumps the life of the fetus in all circumstances, in the eyes of radical activists, that real injustice happens. The power of the strong being exercised unjustly over the weak and this violates core biblical precepts.

Jacers, "That's all" you "will say on this matter"?? Surely you can pump out another 2,500 words to fill another few screens and leave the impression to visitors that the extreme right-wing view is the only Irish view! ~~~~~ Smyrnian, I have advocated allowing women free will, freedom of conscience, uncoerced choice: "The greatest gift that God in His bounty made in creation, and the most conformable to His goodness, and that which He prizes the most, was the freedom of will, with which the creatures with intelligence, they all and they alone, were and are endowed."—Dante Alighieri. That's my answer to those who, like you, think I "have a LOT at stake" and who think that saving a life is "just an expediency." Now if we set aside the anecdotes, the pseudo-bible quotations, threats of damnation, and appeals to the moral authority of Roman Catholic Churchmen, can you guys give any moral reason at all to support depriving women of free will in the most personal and private of all decisions? Your answer: it's wrong to kill an embryo or fetus. OK, now, second step: you have just deprived a pregnant woman in medical crisis of her right to life and shown precisely why the Irish Constitution section 40.3.3 is in practice unworkable as "equal" protection. Got it? Deal with it.

(…more) The other big threat to the abortion laws in Ireland is something that has not been addressed in the Oireachtas hearings: that there are big commercial medical companies out there, watching like vultures, who will execute abortion on demand and will look for any crack in Dáil legislation on the X case to establish their companies in Ireland to make profits and destroy, on demand, human embryos, like you and I were once. More importantly everyone should note that our Christ was once an embryo, a foetus and an infant born of a woman whose husband did not conceive Him with her. In Jewish society mores of those days, it is a miracle that He wasn’t killed as an infant after birth or that His Mother wasn’t forced to abort the baby by the chemical means available in those days. The right to God-given life must always be respected, inside the womb and outside of it. That’s all I will say on this matter.

True sympathy with these views below is all I can offer. But I have to face unpalatable facts and truths. If it came to a democratic vote in an Irish public referendum on the matter and not a Dáil decision, I would, in conscience, vote against the relaxation of abortion laws in Ireland that would lead to abortion on demand. I’ve already posted elsewhere on ICentral of how I used to be pro-choice, respecting women’s right to choose but how that view utterly changed after personally listening to a Swedish lady telling of her experiences in opting for abortion on demand, not once but twice, and the heart-breaking, life-long effect they had on her. (Google “jacersagain Swedish lady”). I’ve also related the story of a 16-yr old American Catholic girl, a daughter of an American friend of mine who was drugged and raped by two men but who carried her baby to fruition, gave it up for adoption but still maintains a loving motherly contact with the now young teenager living with adoptive parents. To this day, she doesn't know which of the two men who raped her is the father (More...)

I would have human sympathy for some points made during the Oireachtas hearings, especially by the Atheist Ireland representative who asked the committee to “Please do not ignore the suffering of pregnant women whose health is at risk, who are victims of rape or incest, or whose foetus has fatal abnormalities…. Whatever laws you pass, please base them on human rights and compassion and on applying reason and empirical evidence, and not on religious doctrines". Everyone can pick out the parts were he is wrong and where he is right. In my view, the most extraordinary contribution was made by Rabbi Lent who said “a foetus in utero, though inherently valuable, has not yet assumed the equal status of full life” (a point that the RCC would challenge because any embryo and foetus has already begun its march towards human life and is inherently entitled to be brought to birth into our world.). He went on to say “This would primarily be when carrying the unborn to term would cause danger and risk to the mother's life. In this instance the foetus may be considered to be actively threatening the life of the mother and, to save her life, a termination could be permitted." That point the RCC would agree with but not under the term ‘deliberate abortion’; for the RCC it would be more a sad side-event in the saving of the mother’s life, God-willed or chosen. What would have been another grand-child of mine died this way.