Oh for the day when a woman can choose to continue a pregnancy or not.
Let me repeat (for the millionth time) a woman’s right to choose does not mean every woman has to choose an abortion. Many would not. But it does mean that someone who’s been raped, someone who made a mistake, someone who has children and is finding it difficult to feed, clothe and keep them warm, has a choice.
At present you have to say, and get doctors to say, that your mental condition is such that a baby will tip you over the edge.
As if that’s not traumatic enough, if you actually are granted the right, you then have to go to a designated clinic and walk through a group of people shouting that you’re a murderer?
Is there anyone who is not revolted by the news that Irish researcher, Catherine Corliss, has uncovered facts that look like there are 800 babies and children’s bodies in a septic tank in the grounds of a convent Home for Unwed Mothers in Galway, Ireland?
The worst thing about this story is is that if it hadn’t been that a Dublin paper picked up the story and told the world, we would never have known. Up until then, local media, the local council, the Roman Catholic church, in spite of repeated efforts by the researcher, didn’t think this story warranted reporting. Read – they wanted it kept under wraps, forgotten.
I bet there are a few backyards in NZ where the same kind of evidence could be found – not the numbers, but the same result of the same punitive attitudes.
There are instances here of dead newborn babies discovered under bushes, a distraught young girl, terrified to tell her parents because she’d frightened of their oh so righteous anger, their righteous punitive fervour about sin?
Here in good old NZ, politicians (apart from the Greens) shy away from the subject of a woman’s right to choose.
Like a lot of us who marched (endlessly) I too feel tired at the mention of this topic. Not because its not relevant but because its taking so bloody long.
The question is the same as it’s always been – what kind of world do we want?
