Pro-life voters must be aware of the position of political parties and individual politicians on abortion as Ireland’s abortion laws may well rest on the outcome of the coming election, Bishop Kevin Doran has said.
In the course of an interview on Newstalk Radio’s Pat Kenny Show, the Bishop of Elphin pointed out that “many of those who wish to remove the 8th Amendment from the Constitution have made no secret of the fact that their ultimate political objective is abortion on demand”.
“That’s very clear from some of the political parties engaged in this debate, and I think people need to take note of that,” he said.
Dr Doran explained: “Any proposal to replace the 8th Amendment will be presented as a limited measure, a tweak. But the fact is that the legislation in Britain in 1967 provided for abortion only in cases of medical emergency. The reality is that one in four pregnancies now ends in abortion.”
Challenged about so-called ‘fatal foetal abnormalities’, Bishop Doran said he found that “a loaded term” in the current debate.
“There is no clarity on an individual pregnancy,” he said. “Doctors will say ‘this child will have a serious life-threatening condition, s/he may die before s/he’s born, s/he may not live long afterwards’. There is no doctor who is going to put down a date of death or this is an absolute certainty.”
Bishop Doran went on to relate cases where parents “who have experienced the terrible distress” of a life-threatening prognosis for their child nevertheless “valued the possibility of holding and caring for their child for a few moments or hours before death naturally occurs”. Added to this, he pointed out, other parents who were advised to abort “have had their child live for some months or some years and were able to care for that child in the family”.
Reacting to a counter argument which raised the issue of Irish women being ‘forced’ to travel to England for an abortion, Bishop Doran said: “I would question the word ‘forced’. The reality is, all over our country, in hospitals and hospices, there are people sitting by the bedsides of relatives suffering cancer or motor neuron disease and they would say that’s very difficult to bear, but we don’t for a moment suggest they should have their lives terminated.”
Arguing that such realities are comparable, Dr Doran stressed that “the response of a civilised society to terminal illness is to offer palliative care, which includes warmth, tenderness, nutrition, hydration, as well as the appropriate management of pain”. Yet, the Bishop added, “there is only one [hospice for children] in Ireland”, a situation he described as “a scandal”.