FOR Christmas week I was stuck in a small, litter strewn Bulgarian ski resort, where there was no snow, and therefore no skiing and therefore nothing much to do.
The nearest town was a couple of hours away by bus. I would have gone to see it, but that a couple who had visited it said they saw dancing bears in the square there.
The handler had a kind of bit going through the bear's mouth, and when he pulled it, the bear went up on his hind legs to try to escape the pain, and seemed to be dancing. Then the handler played his fiddle, as if to accompany the bear's dance. You were expected to throw a few coins to the handler in appreciation of this performance.
I didn't want to see bears being used like this. On the other hand, anyone who is trying to survive by begging in a country with as severe an economic crisis as Bulgaria has, is most pitiably poor. I have seen a bear and a bear master in the sleet in winter in Istanbul. Who knows where the two of them sheltered at night? The man was gaunt with cold and hunger. He was inflicting whatever it was on the animal because he himself was trapped and had no other way to survive. Perhaps he was keeping a family on his few coins. So I suppose.
I tried to about the relative rights concerned. And whenever I do face questions of relative rights, the dialogue surrounding abortion starts up again in my mind. And I am back again among the uncertainties and ambiguities that surround my attitudes to abortion.
Attitudes, in the plural: I have not got the comfort of absolute conviction on this or any comparably important matter. The society I am part of has made some interim decisions about Irish women and abortion. They are not very principled ones, and they do not represent a consensus, but they do allow for coexistence. But the 10 years or so we spent getting to those decisions didn't exhaust the subject.
It will never be exhausted.
I THOUGHT of the women I have known who absolutely and utterly could not, as they perceived it, in the circumstances they were due a pregnancy. And I thought of the things that constitute suffering the apprehension of pain, and the memory of it.
Does the bear suffer, or does it experience each moment of its existence separately? Can a very developed foetus suffer? I know it reacts to stimulus, but can we ever know whether it can suffer? And then, can animals be compared to humans? Can something unborn be compared to something born? The bear is only an animal, but it has lived within human society.
Is it the arrival into society that makes the difference to rights and duties, so that one would not kill a week old baby but one would a week old foetus? Or is it a question of when the foetus becomes not the mother? The unborn cannot survive as the bear would survive if it could get away from its master.
Doesn't that make the choice of the woman's survival over the foetus's survival unique - it is the woman's choice not because of some entitlement, but because she literally chooses one part of herself over another?
I know how confused this is. But people do flounder when it comes to the deep questions, such as the morality of humankind's dealings with animals, and the morality of its dealings with unborn humans. You would think that the long debate about abortion legislation would have taught those who were not completely satisfied with either "yes" or "no" how to approach this complex subject.
But the heat of the debate simplified it. You weren't supposed to think. You were supposed to see that all abortion is so self evidently wrong that no thinking is necessary. And that nothing remains but to condemn. But I find that I have to go on thinking.
Abortion keeps coming up. The Pro Life Campaign people will never stop looking for another referendum. And you may have noticed that the Holy See Mission to the United Nations has withdrawn its symbolic contribution of $2,000 to UNICEF - the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund.
It said that UNICEF workers in various countries were "distributing contraceptives and counselling their use". I should hope they were, I may say. But I don't believe that that's the Vatican's real reason. I believe that another of its given reasons - that UNICEF "participated in the publication of a UN manual advocating the distribution of abortifacient `post coital' contraceptives to refugee women in emergency situations" - is the sticking point.
THE UN booklet in question was about women - refugee women - who have been raped in war. I hazard the view that such many people would find it acceptable that women should have access to the morning after pill, and that it is in the interest of their existing children and their future children (never mind themselves) that they should, and UNICEF is an organisation that puts children first.
I personally could not bear to add any prohibition of my own to the layers of prohibitions heaped on a Muslim woman, say, raped in Bosnia. Her life has been destroyed by a war waged above her head by men, her body has been violated by strange men who raped her in the confident expectation that this would lead to her rejection by her own men, and on top of that, remote men in the Vatican are prohibiting her from doing anything to prevent a child being born of the rape.
I see a woman in those circumstances - and in the one Bosnian war alone there were thousands of women in just such circumstances - as tormented and outraged beyond what can be done to an animal. She is the bear, writ a million times large, and she is also a human, and a sister.
Those are my feelings. But the Vatican represents a different range of feelings. The Vatican holds observer status at the United Nations because of its territorial possessions in Rome. Its donations, like the $2,000 to UNICEF, are not serious contributions - they are symbols of its moral approval or disapproval. I myself approve of there being a body with such a role attached to the UN.
Or rather, insofar as the moral and spiritual dimension of humankind is organised into religions and philosophies and so on, I am glad that those organisations are accepted as influential in humankind's affairs.
This leaves me in the position of supporting the Holy See Mission's existence and function, while passionately disapproving of what it seeks to do to the world's most vulnerable women in the matter of childbearing. It is as if I wanted the bear master to play his fiddle and at the same time wanted the bear to be free. How many paradoxes can one situation contain? And how can a person stop thinking and feeling while they remain to be resolved?