This is not abstract

I read this piece this morning.

Women like Tara shouldn’t need to tell their own stories to make a point. She’s smart and funny and wise on the matter, and has been for years. I was lucky enough to be at an event with her at the start of the year where she had a great piece on how this country only values women if they’re… baking.

People’s medical and life decisions are their own business. Or they should be. The trouble is that Ireland doesn’t agree. We’re all, apparently, entitled to an opinion on this matter.

We’re expected to – in a country whose media are so terrified of not having ‘balance’ that there were obligatory homophobes invited to every debate on marriage equality – ‘respect differences of opinion’, as this was some kind of abstract philosophical discussion where we just all needed to tolerate one another.

Being ‘pro life’, or rather ‘pro-embryo’, as Youth Defence and the Life Institute and their ilk will never be found speaking up for, say, the huge number of refugees fleeing war-torn countries, or children in an inadequate foster care system, is not a position you can hold without having absolutely no respect or empathy for women.

When you tell me you are ‘pro life’, we cannot have a discussion, because already I am lesser to you in your eyes. I am not a person. My body is not my own. When you tell me you are ‘pro life’, you are telling me that in the event of a crisis pregnancy, in the event of my body being asked to grow another human inside it for nine months, regardless of whether I want it or not, regardless of whether it was consensual sex or not, regardless of any risk to my health, regardless of the physical and emotional strain, you simply don’t care. You would rather see me imprisoned than have an abortion. You would rather see me strapped down to a table and have a premature baby sliced out of me. You would rather see me die.

This sounds like hyperbole. Except it isn’t. Fourteen years imprisonment for an abortion: that’s the law. Miss Y. Savita. These are real cases.

(We are coming up to the third anniversary of Savita Halappanavar’s death but we are still comfortable with the ten to twelve women who get on a boat or a plane each day to have a medical procedure that cannot be performed safely or legally in their own country.)

(We brought in a law that radically suggested women whose lives were at risk could have abortions, but even after psychiatrists declared a teenage rape victim suicidal, it wasn’t enough.)

If abortion law is an abstract for you, you are lucky. You are fortunate. For many of us, it is something hanging over our bodies constantly. We are lesser. We are vessels. We are not really people.

But it’s important we don’t get emotional or irrational about it. Otherwise we’re not worth listening to. We’re hysterical, then. Hysteria, from the Greek hystera. Uterus. The only part of us that seems to count.