Ireland's Toxic Romance
I have found that Emer and Connor
are not the exception among young Irish people who abort
their child. During the past 15 years I’ve
done as much crisis pregnancy counseling as possible, from my time in university
to present day, and I have found that binge-drinking (which is a very accepted vice
in Ireland) plays a huge role, while contraception is the enabler. Some examples are painfully etched in my
mind. The mother from Tipperary who dumped her 17-year-old daughter on a street
near an abortion clinic where I met the young girl. The teen was in a cycle of drinking
‘til she blacked out, and she’d gotten pregnant during one of these times. Her
mother felt she had done her best by putting her kid on the Pill, so the
daughter ‘could have her fun’, but they never thought a child would result from
the ‘fun’. Resolute she did not want a grandchild who was
pickled in alcohol, the Irish mammy said she wouldn’t speak to the daughter until
after she had the abortion. Despite my best efforts to help the young girl, she
went through the clinic doors crying and whimpering like a new-born baby herself.
When we were growing up in
Ireland we were told that to sleep around was ‘normal’, and to do otherwise was
to be, ‘backward’ which meant you were treated as a freakish heteroclite. That said, it is not impossible to convince an
Irishwoman out of abortion, a girl I know from back home did the amazing feat
of convincing a married woman not to abort a baby she had conceived when drunk,
a baby who was not her husband’s.
A
common set of
circumstances is when an Irish woman is in a crisis pregnancy, after
becoming pregnant because she was looking for love by drink-fueled
promiscuity, which is modern husband-hunting Irish style. After their
first abortion, they drink more to numb their
guilt, and then have a second abortion for the same reason as the first.
Contraception induces in people
a state of mind where sex and the creation of a new life are wholly separate,
sequestered from each other. Whenever
and wherever the youngest generation of young people are trained to use contraception
and emotionally blackmailed into being promiscuous, addictive poison is
embraced and imbibed more because if there is no young life growing in the womb
to protect, why not have as much of your poison of choice? In
Ireland, this poison is alcohol, and the combination
of binge-drinking and contraception has allowed our natural hedonism to
take
control, meaning ultimately a mutilation of youth and young people
because the
most vulnerable young life must be snuffed out so that promiscuity and
binge-drinking
may continue, and the young life of the
pregnant mother is marred by the psychological assault done to her by
her peers,
her parents and those who willingly dismember her child. The laughing
crowds you saw on
telly who gleefully celebrated with glasses of bubbly in hand as
abortion became legal following the referendum in May, were raising a
glass to a society which has had its conscience
poisoned,
I may have become an
outlier, joining the Latin Mass community and finding a different way of life
from that of my contemporaries, but I have a shared history with the Irish
young people who voted for abortion and sometimes the same hardness and
self-hate I see in them, I see in myself. I remember growing up in Ireland, being
bullied in school, being a pariah on the
playground yet knowing there were a certain few girls who were already binge-drinking.
Had I joined them they would have been my friends because we would have had
something in common and I could always tell on their drinking and they would be
able to tell on me, so we would exert a power over the other. We were twelve. I
chose not to be their drinking companions, but it instilled in me the same contempt
of self which I see in my peers, where I learned that people would not like me
for me, only if I shared a proclivity with them.
 |
| This is a picture of me, Mary O'Regan, as a child in Ireland |
Comments