Free, safe, legal: on the importance of compassion, and why I won’t be playing strategic games

I’m going to come out and say it: I’m for abortion on demand, if that’s what you insist on calling it. Without restrictions.

Time and time again we’re being told to tone it down. Again and again, newspapers insist on publishing opinion pieces telling us to be more strategic and less extreme. Not only are we too angry and shrill; our arguments are simply too much for middle Ireland to take.

But I feel sick every time I think about playing the strategy game, and I can’t help but think that it’s them and not us who are doing it wrong. It is clear as day that volume and persistence works. 30,000+ people don’t turn up to march for choice in the rain during an ongoing bus strike for nothing. Moreover, I’m convinced that it’s worth giving real conversation an honest chance, no matter how difficult that conversation is. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about compassion; and try as politicians might to suggest that Ireland has none, I beg to differ. 87% told Red C during a poll commissioned by Amnesty International Ireland that they want abortion access expanded in Ireland, and 68% agree that we should trust women when they say they need an abortion. And that’s not Dublin’s radicalised women; that’s near consistent across the counties and genders.

Maybe if I were trying to convince the most convicted of so-called pro-life advocates to change their ways I would get into the science about whether or not a foetus can experience pain and try to tease out whether life really does begin at conception. But in conversations with anyone else, I don’t think it really matters.

I’m not here to tell you when life begins. You’re allowed to think of an embryo as the child it may one day become – I’m not going to take that away from you. I’m here to ask you to think of women as people and to take that compassion you have, however deep down, for the woman who is told that her baby is not compatible with life, and extend it to pregnant people in all kinds of different challenging, untimely, complicated situations which you don’t know the details of.

I’m not here to tell you not to feel. You’re allowed to think about the potential of life and the amazing miracle of childbirth and wish for an ideal world where abortions aren’t needed – I’m not going to take that away from you. I’m here to ask you to deal with the complicated greyscale that arises the moment we accept that perfectly healthy zygotes are discarded every day in IVF clinics; that most parents, wherever they stand in the abortion debate, wouldn’t hesitate for a second if forced to choose between saving the life of their living, independently breathing toddler or that of a fertilised egg in a petri dish or even an already implanted, growing foetus.

When does life begin? I don’t know. What does it mean to be alive?

There are situations where we are compelled to empathise with a person who needs access to a termination of a pregnancy, and in those situations we learn that ‘life’ is not that black and white. But we don’t create laws based on our ability to empathise; we don’t write laws about women’s bodies based on how you feel. Because this isn’t about you.

This is about compassion, and I’m convinced that talking about life that way is worth it. I don’t want to play games, pitting women against each other; I don’t want to pretend that I agree with the pinciple of a foetus’s right to life, but only in the instances where I can’t empathise with its mother. And I refuse to play along with a debate that paints young women in need of abortions out as wanton, when the contempt for young single mothers is just as bad.

The rhetoric about abortion on demand and late-term abortions is a dishonest trick. No one has an abortion for fun. No floodgates are going to open, and no red light abortion districts will take over our high streets. We only have to look to Canada, where abortion is no longer regulated by law – available at any time, for any reason – and abortion rates are at the lower end amongst developed countries.

I want us to get real about the fact that pregnant Irish people have abortions, in Ireland and elsewhere at considerable financial and emotional expense, not to mention the completely unnecessary risks to their health. We have to decide how to deal with it: by toning it down and continuing a narrative of shame, or by admitting that this is what life is and working on being compassionate – even when it’s hard.