HYPOCRISY is a noble virtue. It proves conclusively that we know wrong from right. Hypocrisy is the quality we deploy when we wish to conceal that we lack the wisdom to do the right thing, and yet are wise enough to know that we lack, that wisdom. So we dissemble; which is what this State has been doing over abortion.
That we are paralysed by this matter is to our credit, for it shows that we retain that lesser wisdom, the dismal and despairing knowledge that we cannot perceive simple solutions within a vast moral complexity. In this, we are unique in Europe. Everyone else seems to think abortion is a simple moral issue and has legislated accordingly.
And it is a simple moral issue, if you reduce it to slogans like "a woman's right to choose" or, conversely, "abortion is murder". Of course a woman has the right to choose what to do with her body; or, if human life exists in its full sense from the moment of conception, then to end that life merely because it is inconvenient is surely murder.
Escape Route
Yet most of us feel that neither slogan conveys the truth; and most of us would not, on this issue anyway, be in our legislators' shoes. Any action they take could have unintended and undesirable consequences. And is it not better to do nothing, and be only a passive author of the undesirable - with dear old England as an escape route for our problems - than to be the active author of measures which have results you might find appalling?
The overwhelming majority of Irish people detest abortion. That is the certain political truth which any politician framing laws to permit abortion must face. Equally, the majority of Irish people feel that people have both the right to information about abortion, and the right to travel for an abortion, most especially if the abortion is for a woman who already is, or will become, a victim, either through rape, youth or illness.
Those three conditions - pregnancy through rape, pregnancy of the very young, or pregnancy that jeopardises the mother's health - were what, moved the British Liberal, David Steel, to introduce the British abortion Act 30 years ago.
And the floodgates opened. Now, if you believe that the kernel of the matter is simply a woman's right to choose the destiny of her own body and its contents, the floodgates merely unleashed the waters of political honesty and clinical necessity. You perceive no problem in this and I envy you that simplicity of judgment, for I cannot make it myself. Nor, indeed, can I accept that simple and straightforward opposing argument that all abortion is murder.
We know there is no "controlled" distribution of the right to abortion. The concept of authorisation-by-experts inevitably leads to abortion on demand. Experts wilt be conjured up to tell you whatever you want to hear - and isn't that a woman's plain and simple right?
Plainly and simply, no. Virtually nobody believes that a woman has an absolute right to control the contents of her body. Virtually nobody believes that a woman who is seven months pregnant can have the contents of her womb scraped out merely because she feels like it. All of us know, at one level or another, that a woman's rights are circumscribed by nature.
Bodily Integrity
The sense of bodily integrity" which defines maleness does not apply to women. Fresh lives are conceived and launched within their bodies, and between those two moments of conception and birth a woman becomes distinctly different from the male of the species. The same laws do not apply. That is why the issue causes us such agony; because for every law we might frame to govern pregnancy, its continuation or its termination, we must allow sub-clauses which then subvert that very law.
Only the heartless, the absolutist, believe that the raped child must go through with her pregnancy: there have been few more ignoble and discreditable, deeds in the history of this state than that its resources should have been deployed with such energy and speed to prevent X having an abortion. But the X case is an exception. Most abortions are conducted simply (though, of course, it is not, simple) because the woman does not want to continue with her pregnancy.
In my heart, I cannot compel any woman to do what I will never do - go to term with a pregnancy. And if abortion were simply a matter of removing a small clot of unwanted tissue - a parasitic growth, I heard a feminist charmlessly describe it - then there would be no problem. It is not that simple. Most of us share a profound loathing of the reality of a five-month-old foetus being flushed out of its native sanctuary and left to perish on the cold metal of a petri dish; over that loathing we have no, control.
So we are not agnostic on such matters; but our problem is that we are not agnostic on any of these matters. Must a woman go through with a pregnancy which will forever change her life in ways she does not want? Must this woman effectively abandon her career by having a baby she conceived by accident? Must this woman possibly endanger her life or her mental health with a pregnancy she has no desire to continue?
Most of us will come up with the two-word answer of true hypocrites when we are asked" these questions: No, but... When we deal with the issue of abortion, we do so with immense unhappiness and a full arsenal of No, buts...and with good reason.
A foetus is at once the most powerless thing in the world, whose life is normally ended (though not, dear God, always) within moments of it being hauled from the womb and it is also the most powerful, for it creates duties and labours which will command the mother's life for a score of years. It is the twin-polarity of absolute power and absolute powerlessness of the foetus which paralyses us hypocrites bleating No, but on the issue of abortion, like moons impotently fixed by the opposing gravitational pull of two planets. We simply cannot blame politicians for being as No, but...as we hypocrites seem to be.