A friend suggests adoption and a baby's life is saved in Modern Ireland

The one certainty in Siobhan’s mind was that if she didn’t have an abortion, she could not raise the baby herself. She already had one little boy and was barely coping.  Her boyfriend of many years was in chains to an addiction and while they lived together, she was forever in a pattern of leaving the flat and going to sleep on a friend’s couch because she didn’t want their son to be around his father when he was drunk and high.

She loved her boyfriend madly. He was her poet who could always pull beautiful words together like pearls on a string and enthrall her ever more. Siobhan’s parents were less than impressed and reminded her that she had done so well at school (the one sign in modern Ireland which we hold up as indicating a healthy future). So they cut her off, withholding affection ‘til she broke up with her sweetheart-the-drunk which was never going to happen.

He was averse to marrying her. Most of her friends had fellows with drink problems and they didn’t leave their men, and it never crossed her mind to do so either. I knew of Siobhan’s crisis pregnancy because one of her friends knew me and was struggling to help Siobhan find a way forward. Siobhan was desperately fighting against a temptation to have an abortion, the mere idea was hideously gruesome to her, but she was beginning to feel she had ‘no other choice’.  Siobhan mentioned that she’d had previous pregnancies yet I made the deliberate choice not to find out specifics - to seek answers to that question would have meant her friend and I would be dead to her – you do not make an Irish girl conscious of her shame.

Here is where Irish girls are the absolute exception. I have helped pregnant women in crisis from all over the world and it is an essential step to ask them if they have had an abortion before and if so for what reason, and the majority of them have even said they were grateful to me for showing concern as to their history.  Not so with an Irish girl. Not so.

To ask a girl born and raised in Ireland those same questions is to mean she will ghost you and this may sound the baby’s death knell. And in Siobhan’s case she had not talked about why she felt so pressured into having an abortion with her boyfriend. This is ever more typical among Irish women – that secrecy like the grave among the chattiest people on earth – signifying the internal contradictions in the Irish character you meet in a pregnant Irish woman in panic. If an Irish woman is not going to tell the man with whom she is intimate about such things, to think she will tell you is hubris.

Her friend, however, seeing how much Siobhan thought of abortion as slaying her own child, did say these words which saved the baby’s life, ‘would you ever think of adoption? Think of the joy the baby would give a couple who can’t have kids of their own. This would be very generous of you.’

I would never have dared suggest this to Siobhan because in my experience to mention adoption to a girl in crisis pregnancy is to risk her displeasure, and to hear, ‘the baby will be abused!’  But what a close friend could do, I could not. In turn Siobhan became obsessed with the idea: there was a way to keep the baby alive and to allow for him to have a life she could not give him. I can only take miniscule credit for the baby being saved because her friend did most of the work.  I only helped from the sidelines by encouraging the friend to keep encouraging Siobhan towards adoption. 

The friend kept reiterating how generous it would be of Siobhan to put the baby up for adoption and her words spoke to her heart. For the Irish girl it is a source of pride to ‘be the giver’ or ‘to do the generous thing’ and to get credit for good-heartedness by a most genuine act of selflessness in giving to another woman.  This may be the subject of a longer form piece of writing, but blindly pro-abortion as the young Irish often are, they still have this strongest of strong empathy for couples who cannot have a baby of their own, and yet they are contrarily oblivious to how their role in voting for abortion means it makes it ever more impossible for a childless couple to adopt.   

But could Siobhan bear the pain of parting with her babe? With each passing month, she realized that she was the one person who would know pain, yet three people would profit immeasurably, the baby would have his life spared and a couple would know the immense happiness of calling him their own.

What I’m about to write may shock you but it is nonetheless true and the most telling detail of all: Siobhan and her boyfriend never discussed her pregnancy, and never talked about the baby going for adoption. Not once. To do so would have been to open the Pandora’s box as to her reasons for thinking him an unfit father and why his addictions made him a stranger to her.

Then there came a still, cold morning when Siobhan gave birth, patted his fluffy head, bathed his newborn face in her tears and gave him into the arms of another.

The Latin Mass Society has been organising glorious Traditional Latin Masses in reparation for the Irish voting abortion into law, and I hope that sharing my experience will edify you and give you hope that Ireland’s young people may come to save their young. 

I wrote this column for The Latin Mass Society Magazine Spring 2019 edition, which you may read here.