IRELAND
National Catholic Reporter
Michael Sean Winters | May. 13, 2013 Distinctly Catholic
Of course, Cardinal Sean O’Malley is not going to attend Boston College’s graduation ceremony and share the stage with – and provide a photo-op to – the Taoiseach of Ireland, Enda Kenny.
Kenny’s government, when faced with a horrible tragedy in the death of Savita Halappanavar, not only failed to stick to the facts – Irish law permitted inducing pregnancy in such cases – it used the tragedy to re-visit Ireland’s abortion laws. As Charles Camosy observed, “[Ireland] is a great example of a developed country which refuses to choose between women and their prenatal children. They are not only on the right side of justice, they are on the right side of history.” The government in Ireland wishes to turn its back on that proud history and make direct abortion licit when the life of the mother is threatened. The proposed law could also require Catholic hospitals to perform direct abortions.
To be clear, this new law does not only allow procedures that have the unintended effect of losing the child. It permits direct abortion, in which one life is chosen over another. The issue is not merely abstract for me. When my mother was pregnant with me, she had intended to go to a public hospital. But, weeks before the due date, the maternity wing at that hospital burned. Back then, at a Catholic hospital, if the doctors had a choice of saving the life of the child or the mother, they saved the child. Conscious of the fact that she had a five year old daughter at home, my mother chose to go to Mt. Sinai hospital where, thankfully, I was born without complications for either of us. I understand my mother’s reasoning. I understand, too, that few choices could be more wrenching. But, I also understand that the direct killing of a child is always wrong, and that if it had come to it, my mother’s understandable choice to preserve her own life, taken for entirely unselfish reasons, would nonetheless have been a wrong choice.
The Kenny government has also recalled its ambassador to the Vatican and missed no opportunity to take a whack at the Catholic Church. Obviously, the reprehensible behavior of many Catholic clergy invited skepticism and hostility, and the attempts to cover-up that behavior by the hierarchy deprived the Church of its historic high esteem in the eyes of the people of Ireland. You did not need the government to achieve this last regrettable outcome. The hierarchs did it all on their own.
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