MORALS AND LAW

People  have been making laws about abortion for thousands of years.  We made laws, changed laws, accepted and rejected legal reasons and moral principles for and against  it ; in biblical times political destruction of male children at birth, or before, for fear of the growing political power  of  the Israelites in Egypt ; in  pre-Christian  Irish law abortion as a reason for divorce, ancient Greek and Roman law  for regulating public behaviour ; in France between the two world wars authorities believing under-population would lead to more  military defeats ; not long ago important people believing in eugenics for creating public "excellence" and even the survival of poetic culture  among the "best people".

 But in all the human experience of those thousands of years of adjustments and changes in thought and law about termination of pregnancy, there can hardly have been  such a scene as that in Dublin at the result of the recent civil vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution .

People were dancing in the street.

We can hardly  imagine the Egyptians, or the  Babylonians who seem to have inspired much of what Israelites came to believe in, or important writers like Yeats or Wells who said there were too many people in the world, dancing in the streets when  governments changed  laws about too many people to feed  or not enough warriors  to fight. 

What mattered most to those who recently danced in Dublin was a decision not about state  war or wealth but about  private rights, especially the rights of women.

A monumental  historical change, climax to a long series of campaigns and requests, demands and hopes for personal control of personal lives to take precedence, if so demanded,  over state or even long held community moralities.  Such a development shows  an upheaval of ideas about right and wrong, about rights and authority in every part of the life of all of us. If ever there was a time for careful, wise, informed, courteous public and private  discussion of such moral issues  it is now.

We can choose to think fearfully or hopefully.  

We are being  forced to think and rethink what we mean by right and wrong in our  human pro-creation.  People in the Christian tradition - not excusivley but in Europe importantly - have had for centuries a deeply held belief about human conception, calling it Pro-creation based on the belief that conceiving is a continuation of the original divine creation - a devolution of power from Creator to human beings, devolving to us the power  to continue divine creation in a humanly managed way. The divine potential to create was activated by the divine will to do so, our human potential to procreation is activated by our free will to do so too. That is the dignified belief of millions of us, that   Humans are pro-Creators not because this was written in a Sacred Book or repeated  around ancient firesides - it was  told around ancient firesides and written in sacred books because people believed  this is what they were doing when they came together in this  loving creative relationship. The conception, the love before it, the fusion and womb-life after it were sacred. This was a sacred act, not done only for selfish reasons as if its result  could be put away as neither important nor sacred.

Perhaps this ancient and spiritual  idea on which so much  of our human moral thinking has rested could have been talked about more in the recent arguments about  the Irish Constitution. Perhaps if it had been, our sense of our own sacredness and dignity might have been enhanced. It may have some place in our discussions about abortion now in the north of Ireland.

And it is we who shall decide whether it will or not.  

Many of our people are troubled by the lives we did not create willingly. Forced to carry what she did not create willingly, an assaulted  victim is in a desert of uncertainty, between different schools of thought about what is right to do. Her hurt is prolonged by fear and doubt. That is one of the most serious and profound of the problems we must  all face ; we have to discuss it with   openness, courage, generosity and courtesy , fully recognising what we have believed in the past, what we believe now and our reasons for both.   Thinking  and acting with the greatest generosity possible according to our present beliefs, seeing if there is any fresh thinking about conception that can help us, blessing with our courtesy those who support our beliefs and those who don't - recognising where we succeeded in enhancing our divine-human life and where and how we failed.  We need to  talk and write about all the insights we humans have had throughout our history, about whether  or not these insights recognised our  human  responsibility and dignity by bringing happiness and healing to all our people, especially those who have suffered through abuse or because of  our inability to face up to and remedy it.

There are other questions to solve, freedom of conscience, care of our fellow citizens to whom their generous pro-creation has brought unexpected burdens, many questions that must see us exploring how generous  to each other we can be, whatever our beliefs.