In case you didn’t know, Mary O’Rourke is an ‘agony aunt’
for The Irish Independent weekend magazine. This 
weekend, she was giving advice
to a woman who had an abortion after a one-night stand.
The woman describes how she had her abortion five years ago.
She says she “already feels guilty” about it and the current debate about
abortion is making her “feel a whole lot worse”.
She says she become pregnant “after a one-night stand with a
workmate”. She never told him and still sees him everyday at work.
The woman describes how, when she told friends about her
abortion, “some were very supportive” but “one was really judgmental” and told
her she had done the “wrong thing”.
This made her “shut down completely” and now she says she
feels as if she is “carrying this huge guilty secret around with me”.
She concludes: “The whole thing was traumatic enough without
the constantly pointing fingers. I don’t know where to turn”.
Mary O’Rourke advice is, needless to say, completely
non-judgemental. She expresses no opinion whatever about the rightness or
wrongness of abortion, not even in a situation such as this where it is clearly
a ‘social’ abortion.
Obviously Mary should not condemn
this woman but it’s a bit of a worry that she can’t find someway to express
some level of misgiving about the death of the baby.
Perhaps the woman feels guilty because deep down she knows
she really did do something wrong and therefore feels guilty for a reason? Perhaps
the only way to resolve this is to admit she did wrong and then seek
forgiveness. Perhaps this is the best possible advice Mary can give her.
But no, instead, true to the doctrine of ‘respect your
choice at all costs’ Mary advises her to go and see a therapist and to talk it
through with him or her.
This woman is, in fact, a victim of the huge changes in
social mores brought about by the sex revolution.
The consequent ubiquity of casual sex means that there are
many ‘one-night stands’ and in a large number of cases a pregnancy will result
and the woman will likely feel alone and probably ill-used.
The temptation to resort to abortion will be enormous.
There is almost certainly no going back to the once almost
universal norm of no sex outside marriage, but if we managed to reduce the
amount of casual sex that takes place by moving towards a norm of no sex outside a committed
relationship then far fewer women would find themselves faced with the type of
situation faced by this woman.
The real tragedy is that so few people seem able to connect
the dots and to see that what lands huge numbers of women in this sort of
situation is the radical change in sexual behaviour inaugurated by the sex
revolution.
The pity is that Mary can’t seem to see it either. Does she
really have no misgivings at all about the sea-change in social attitudes that
leads to this type of scenario with monotonous regularity and tragic
consequences?