Ireland and Abortion

It isn’t just here in America that the religious right seeks to dictate to us. It took a High Court judge to allow a seventeen year old Irish girl to go to England for an abortion. Here’s the story from the BBC: BBC NEWS | Europe | Irish teen wins abortion battle

How stupid is this? Why should this girl be denied an abortion? Her baby will not survive. Children with its condition never survive. They all die within a few days of birth. There is no ethical dilemma in this case. The baby has no prospect so why should the girl be forced to go through the whole pregnancy simply to satisfy the whimsical diktat of the stuffy old men of the Roman Catholic Church?

People who are “right to lifers” are simply closet dictators who don’t give a flying fig about the welfare or health of the pregnant woman [or girl in this case]. They value a grown woman far less than they value an unborn child. And in the extreme they place greater value on an undifferentiated clump of cells, that may or may not reach maturity, as on an already living person. Just to satisfy their superstition [i.e. religion].

The churches of the world have done more, collectively, to impede and destroy life, than any other of our institutions. Then they have the unmitigated nerve to foist their hypocrisy on us over abortion. Enough.

To think: this poor girl had to go to court to have a perfectly sensible, and ethical, decision endorsed. What would have happened had she not done so? What would have happened if she had complications and had died? Then I suppose the religious drones would have trotted out the old “god’s will is mysterious” argument.

Phooey.

There is no such thing as benign religion, especially when it intrudes into the law of the land.

Stories like this remind us of the long hard fight still ahead: rolling back the malignancy known as religion is a multi-generational task. Unfortunatrely we have only just begun.