Attempts to write the baby out of the abortion debate won't succeed

It must be a strange place, that parallel universe of the pro-abortion campaigner, where killing is dressed up as compassion, and where, in stout denial of all the scientific facts, babies aren’t really human beings.

Pregnant women aren’t really carrying a baby in their wombs you see. Maybe they find them in cabbage patches. Or storks bring them in cute colourful slings.

It’s like reasoning with small, very stubborn, children except these people aren’t cute. They are fanatics – extremists who believe that unborn babies can be aborted until birth. Take a minute to imagine what that involves: the baby’s heart started to beat at 3 weeks; at 8 weeks she was perfectly formed; babies born at 23 weeks have survived outside the womb, but Irish abortion advocates want to ensure that babies can aborted right through all nine months of pregnancy.

It’s difficult to understand this mind set, since it’s so out of kilter with what we normally understand to be required to be a compassionate or civilised society. It’s in our nature to protect children, and to care for those in crisis. It’s natural to recoil at the thought of ending a child’s life.

Yet, this week when Vincent Browne asked abortion campaigners on Tv3 to explain their opposition to any term limits they said that killing babies until birth should be legal in case the baby had a disability or the woman’s circumstances had changed.

In other words, instead of compassion, they called for killing. Instead of addressing women’s needs, they pushed for abortion. They are calling for the opposite of what a really progressive society would do, which is to terminate the crisis and not the child.

In fairness, some abortion campaigners may well be uneasy at the thought of killing a baby this late in pregnancy, but they are committed to an extreme left-wing/liberal ideology which refuses to give an inch in terms of acknowledging the very obvious humanity of the baby.

The problem for them is that the humanity of the baby can no longer be denied – and this has been the case for decades. 

It’s why polls actually show that most Irish people reject abortion-on-demand, and why most people consider the position of #Repealthe8th groups to be so extreme. (In 2013, Choice Ireland also argued in defence of gendercide – aborting babies because they were girls – an extreme position actually shared by most abortion campaigners but which would be appalling to the vast majority of decent people).Saying the unborn child is not a baby just won’t work. Too many people have seen ultrasounds, and have marvelled over all the amazing photographs of babies in the womb which pop up everywhere on social media. Too many people have heard their own baby’s heartbeat, or seen their baby waving or smiling in scans, to believe this propaganda.

Abortion campaigners can’t close that window to the womb. So that’s why they try to ignore it, to obfuscate the humanity of the baby with strident claims of competitive rights between “the woman and the fetus”.

But that won’t work either. It would be a very strange and distressing world if women saw their baby as an enemy. Most women with crisis pregnancies don’t do that: they are in crisis and they need support, but sometimes all they are offered is abortion. In this country, most women with a crisis pregnancy go on to have their baby, and those babies are much loved and cherished. No-one regrets giving life to their child.

The recent emergence of videos (below) released by investigative journalists in the US show abortionists callously harvesting and selling baby parts. This horrific footage leaves us in no doubt that the abortion industry knows that this is a baby. They have hardened themselves to deal with that fact because they are making money from selling abortion to vulnerable women.

Deep down, people are opposed to abortion because destroying a human life disturbs us, and because we know that we can do better for women than to simply tell them to get rid of their baby, and then leave them with the all the consequences and the regret and sorrow of that loss.In the past 14 years we’ve seen our abortion rates drop by a massive 45% in Ireland, so maybe we’re getting better as a society at providing the support that’s needed – though the pro-abortion Labour Party aren’t helping matters by cutting payments to single parents.

We need to do more. Attempts to write the baby out of the abortion debate doesn’t help women and doesn’t help children.  The inescapable fact is that, for every baby, their abortion story ends badly, because abortion ends their life. It kills them. And no amount of denial or pretence can change that fact.

WATCH the first video from the Centre for Medical Progress