Abortion issue returns but world has changed

They haven't gone away, you know. With Dana's stunning victory in the European Parliament elections, and Archbishop Connell's call to arms last Sunday, a renewed campaign for yet another referendum on abortion is well under way. The uneasy ceasefire that has been observed in Ireland's moral civil war since the divorce referendum is about to break down. The rusty pike of righteousness is being taken out of the thatch. Unsullied loins are being girded for battle. Incendiary slogans are being reassembled. Like Star Wars, Abba and flared trousers, abortion is back.

Except, of course, that it returns as if from a long exile, wearing an expression of loss and puzzlement, blinking at an old familiar landscape now turned strange and treacherous. The country it revisits is not the one it left embittered after the original referendum of 1983 or shocked and exhausted after the X case and its many political and psychological repercussions in the early 1990s.

Ireland may now be better or worse than it was then, but it is certainly less naive. After 16 years as a supposedly abortion-free zone, we have learned from the continuing exodus to the abortion clinics of London that reality is supremely indifferent to the rhetoric of constitutional formula. We know from experience that an absolute prohibition on abortion can be enforced only by methods of repression - limiting the right of pregnant women to travel and censoring books, magazines, newspapers and broadcasts that contain information about abortion - incompatible with the preservation of a functioning democracy.

TO have more than a merely symbolic meaning, the kind of absolute prohibition on abortion which is being demanded would require, in effect, an authoritarian revolution that is not going to happen. So why, then, do conservatives stake so much on this one issue? Why do they continue to fight so hard for a victory they know to be pyrrhic?

The answer, quite simply, is that they have no other cause to fight. We have seen the apocalypse and it has been, from a conservative point of view, rather disappointing. Divorce has come in and instead of the end of civilisation as we know it, nothing much has changed. Homosexuality has been decriminalised, and the promised volcanoes, earthquakes, floods and plagues have yet to arrive. Condoms are available from slot machines but the Satanist community remains, so far as I know, somewhat smaller than the Crossmaglen branch of the Glasgow Rangers Supporters Club.

How much support would a campaign to reimpose the prohibitions on divorce, homosexuality or contraception expect to gather now? Conservatives have tacitly abandoned issues they once insisted were crucial to the very survival of society. The language, even of 25 years ago, has become all but unutterable.

I was struck by this recently when a kind neighbour gave me a Catholic Truth Society pamphlet she found in a tidy-up and was about to throw away. Published in 1974 under the title Facing Up to Humanae Vitae, it is attributed to "a Catholic Mother" and purports to be an account of how one woman came to terms with the ban on artificial contraception. That ban remains in place, of course, but the language in which it was defended just a quarter of a century ago has almost entirely lost its meaning. Reading the pamphlet is like looking at the inscriptions on an ancient tomb left behind by a forgotten civilisation.

OUR "Catholic Mother", for example, reflects the belief, now conveniently neglected, that, if Humanae Vitae is wrong, then so is everything the church teaches. "Either the Pope was right, or he was wrong. Either that Encyclical came from God, or it didn't. If it didn't, then where was the conflict? The Pope was an imposter and I had no place in his Church. If it did, though, what was I doing questioning it, or even contemplating obedience? . . . What was I doing listening to all these critics? My God-given task in the world was not to choose the structure of his Church, to draw up the rules, or yet dispense them. Mine was to live them and train my children to do the same."

"Catholic Mother" was sure that the great theme of all the Gospels and all the lives of the saints was obedience. She confessed to finding contraceptives themselves "repulsive, ugly and embarrassing". And she was sure that women didn't really like sex, anyway. "They feel a lack of interest in sex is something lacking in them, personally, or an insult to their husbands. They won't admit it to their men, to a priest or doctor even, but they confess it to each other: they wouldn't find life any great hardship without sex. To some it would be a positive relief. It is because they believe such a course impossible for their husbands, and not their right to impose, that they go on suffering . . ."

And she felt that, if they really tried, married men could learn to live without sex as well. "The example of a celibate and largely happy and fulfilled clergy is a daily reminder of what can be achieved when men are determined." This, indeed, was the solution she and her husband had arrived at. "My renewed faith and more fervent religious practice inspired my husband to see it the same way, and he undertook a sexless life, with absolutely no harmful effects on either him or the marriage . . . The whole vexed question of sex and birth control has been completely shelved. The decision was taken from us. There is a peace in the house I have never known before, not only on that topic, but many more. Non-Catholic women have confided in me that they wish they had a Pope to quote at home."

The point is not just that this kind of stuff no longer has any purchase on public debate, but that it doesn't even work within the church any more. How many practising Catholics in Ireland are now inclined to attach the words "happy and fulfilled" to the words "celibate clergy" when sex is being discussed? How many believers think that obedience is the primary spiritual virtue? How many of the Faithful think that a "sexless life" is better for marriage than the embarrassment of dealing with repulsive and ugly contraceptives? The mental world of "Catholic Mother" is now in a very distant and scarcely inhabited galaxy.

The political logic of the first abortion referendum was the hope that a victory on this issue might be a first step to bringing back that world. In 1983 it was still possible to imagine that a symbolic declaration of Irish righteousness might be the start of a counter-revolution. But that logic has completely collapsed. Unlike Star Wars, Abba, or flares, Catholic Mother is not going to be revived. Whatever the Constitution says, the world of unquestioning obedience and celibate marriage is not coming back . . . Ever.