We will be stepping out from this house to vote on Friday 25th May 2018. The boss has been resolute in getting herself registered to cast the first of all the votes she will make in her life. My daughters have made up their minds now and I knew my mind on this for years. There has a lot of talking between us. Respectfully mostly, heatedly too. Sometimes, looking up mid rant, I catch a wry look telegraphed from one to the other. They do not understand. They think that this is new to this generation, this decade. Women, older women, old women can not speak to them. One way or another. They are indulgent.
I shove a scissors in my bag and march to the village and a massive low-lying billboard with the words 'licence to kill' in bold over a great fat baby in utero. The thing is at eye level, deceptive, offensive... manipulative. I cut it down and fling it over a wall unwilling to hold it for long. Another one, too high to reach, on the main street, likewise uses the image of a woman's body, her pregnant belly to depict a child, who looks to be at least eight months old though still anchored to the umbilicus. Deceptive, offensive... manipulative.
"The thing is darling" I tell the boss on our Sunday walk "the thing is I can't get it out of my mind, this vision of them coming by night, in the dark, with their ladders...or...or cranes, to plaster, insert, shove into my eyeline this nauseating horror show. Uninvited. The visual mugging... using women's bodies, everywoman's body..."
She laughs at me then, at my hissing, and points to a poster high over our heads. It shows a man talking at a small girl. She looks back at him smilingly. The word NO hovers over her shining head.
"I mean that one? Look at that one? What's the point of that one. You think like he's saying
'when you grow up little girl, you too might want to kill babies? may not be trusted? and, I mean, Daddy says no? Daddy will protect you... from you?"
"And that one" she points upward at a sleeping infant who at least seems to be born and wrapped in a blanket.
"..like that one? like someone took a picture of their baby and used that? For that!"
When we get home the boy is in the kitchen frying sausages, lost in his leisurely Sunday drift, unperturbed by any of this, or anything at all.
"I mean posters? what posters? never noticed any posters. Are there posters? Have a sausage? There's a few over there I don't think I'll eat..."
The thing is I remember, I was there, when the wretched article went into the Irish Constitution in 1983. I wasn't much older than they are now. I lived in that time. That time of college, of wry acceptance that there would be no job for you when you were finished, when the idea of an income, a car or, one day, a house was a dim chance in your worldview. And the Church, the Catholic Church was everywhere, fingers poking into everything still.
Your best aspiration, your most hopeful gameplan was to travel, to leave, to go to England, America, Australia. You'd go to work, for a laugh, for a life. For a termination of pregnancy should you need that when and if you were raped, caught, found yourself accidentally and disastrously pregnant. That too.
In Ireland, a conforming elite mopped up the good stuff, hoarded from scarcity, stayed.
And then came, who saw that coming? the Celtic Tiger and the Internet. Access to money and discourses, the possibility of choice. A way to live in your own country, whoever saw that?
And the Catholic Church losing its stranglehold, slowly, slowly, and now with dizzying speed. Our minds, opening like flowers, expanding, understood. Our eyes opening, saw. We saw at last the women imprisoned and abused in the laundries, the babies taken for rich catholics, 'unsuitable' infants neglected, starved. And finally we saw the culpability of the church in sheltering paedophiles, sadists, predator priests. A patriarchal state in a dark willing waltz with the church, the priapic hypocritical priests.
And since then I have had children, I have struggled, I have prospered, suffered dark days and good ones. I've had decades of bloody periods, bloody childbirths, hormonal tides. I have had beloved sons and daughters. Above all else, I have chosen. I have chosen each childbirth, each relationship, each passion I followed. And that trip to England when, disastrously pregnant, I travelled to end it, I have chosen that too.
I choose that. I tell my daughters that:
"You get to choose, dear ones. You carry your babe in your body, in your mind, in your heart, in your soul. You must choose that. Pregnancies happen randomly, accidentally, deliberately, thrillingly, and sometimes as a result of a criminal act. You are not (actually) Handmaid, Incubator, a Vessel of the Lord. You are a woman. You know. You know when a pregnancy will damage you in your own heart's core. And you terminate. You choose and you terminate, and you know that is the right thing for you and an embryonic being burrowing into your body. Sometimes you cannot deliver, and you choose."
When I woke up that time in London I was crying. Lying quiet, staring out at blurry leaves shifting in sunlight through the long french windows on the ward. The voice of a nurse, strange, kind english vowels, behind me asking if I was all right, if I going to be all right? "Yeah... no... I'm not... but I will be. I will be all right." Thinking how I didn't know where this place, somewhere in London, where I was leaving my blood and my embryo, actually was. Didn't know where I actually was...
And afterwards, long desolate months of the massive hormone fall, the bleedings I was glad to suffer. Knowing, at the end of it I would have my life back. And so it has been.
And now, with this Referendum, you tell yourself that this is not 1983? That's what you think, before the posters, the No-screaming naysayers, the singleminded absolutists come back again among us, roaring about unreliable, helpless, infantile women, who have terminated 'boys and girls' for 'social reasons'. Who must not the allowed' to choose. Not to choose. Never to choose. Choice, the final frontier for women in casting of being 'less than' womb bearers. In rejecting patriarchy, catholic control.
They come on from the Church, the IONA INSTIUTE, the Catholics. Maria Steen, David Quinn, Patricia Casey et al, directors named. You find the website. They describe themselves;
"The only organization in the world designed exclusively for top-ranking Catholic business-leaders and their spouses' Also 'The Iona Institute promotes the place of marriage and religion in society. We defend the continued existence of publicly funded denominational schools. We also promote freedom of conscience and religion'
Top Catholics then, (your everyday souls need not apply ) seeking to speak for us, act for us, choose for us, same as it ever was.
They scream like demons, when Google, Facebook ban adverts from abroad. They have the money, the power, still.
Will we let them do this again? Will we insist that our democratically elected government legislate as we direct, to regulate Abortion. Will we allow this Diktat to remain, this law beyond the reach of our laws, in the Irish Constitution. Will we let the catholic church or any other church continue to control what happens to women by stealth? By ruthless barracking, posters, lies?
Will you walk to polling booth on Friday, will your children walk with you, your people, your men, and vote for this, only this; for women's personhood, women's experience, women's choice, for women and only women's right to decide?
I shove a scissors in my bag and march to the village and a massive low-lying billboard with the words 'licence to kill' in bold over a great fat baby in utero. The thing is at eye level, deceptive, offensive... manipulative. I cut it down and fling it over a wall unwilling to hold it for long. Another one, too high to reach, on the main street, likewise uses the image of a woman's body, her pregnant belly to depict a child, who looks to be at least eight months old though still anchored to the umbilicus. Deceptive, offensive... manipulative.
"The thing is darling" I tell the boss on our Sunday walk "the thing is I can't get it out of my mind, this vision of them coming by night, in the dark, with their ladders...or...or cranes, to plaster, insert, shove into my eyeline this nauseating horror show. Uninvited. The visual mugging... using women's bodies, everywoman's body..."
She laughs at me then, at my hissing, and points to a poster high over our heads. It shows a man talking at a small girl. She looks back at him smilingly. The word NO hovers over her shining head.
"I mean that one? Look at that one? What's the point of that one. You think like he's saying
'when you grow up little girl, you too might want to kill babies? may not be trusted? and, I mean, Daddy says no? Daddy will protect you... from you?"
"And that one" she points upward at a sleeping infant who at least seems to be born and wrapped in a blanket.
"..like that one? like someone took a picture of their baby and used that? For that!"
When we get home the boy is in the kitchen frying sausages, lost in his leisurely Sunday drift, unperturbed by any of this, or anything at all.
"I mean posters? what posters? never noticed any posters. Are there posters? Have a sausage? There's a few over there I don't think I'll eat..."
The thing is I remember, I was there, when the wretched article went into the Irish Constitution in 1983. I wasn't much older than they are now. I lived in that time. That time of college, of wry acceptance that there would be no job for you when you were finished, when the idea of an income, a car or, one day, a house was a dim chance in your worldview. And the Church, the Catholic Church was everywhere, fingers poking into everything still.
Your best aspiration, your most hopeful gameplan was to travel, to leave, to go to England, America, Australia. You'd go to work, for a laugh, for a life. For a termination of pregnancy should you need that when and if you were raped, caught, found yourself accidentally and disastrously pregnant. That too.
In Ireland, a conforming elite mopped up the good stuff, hoarded from scarcity, stayed.
And then came, who saw that coming? the Celtic Tiger and the Internet. Access to money and discourses, the possibility of choice. A way to live in your own country, whoever saw that?
And the Catholic Church losing its stranglehold, slowly, slowly, and now with dizzying speed. Our minds, opening like flowers, expanding, understood. Our eyes opening, saw. We saw at last the women imprisoned and abused in the laundries, the babies taken for rich catholics, 'unsuitable' infants neglected, starved. And finally we saw the culpability of the church in sheltering paedophiles, sadists, predator priests. A patriarchal state in a dark willing waltz with the church, the priapic hypocritical priests.
And since then I have had children, I have struggled, I have prospered, suffered dark days and good ones. I've had decades of bloody periods, bloody childbirths, hormonal tides. I have had beloved sons and daughters. Above all else, I have chosen. I have chosen each childbirth, each relationship, each passion I followed. And that trip to England when, disastrously pregnant, I travelled to end it, I have chosen that too.
I choose that. I tell my daughters that:
"You get to choose, dear ones. You carry your babe in your body, in your mind, in your heart, in your soul. You must choose that. Pregnancies happen randomly, accidentally, deliberately, thrillingly, and sometimes as a result of a criminal act. You are not (actually) Handmaid, Incubator, a Vessel of the Lord. You are a woman. You know. You know when a pregnancy will damage you in your own heart's core. And you terminate. You choose and you terminate, and you know that is the right thing for you and an embryonic being burrowing into your body. Sometimes you cannot deliver, and you choose."
When I woke up that time in London I was crying. Lying quiet, staring out at blurry leaves shifting in sunlight through the long french windows on the ward. The voice of a nurse, strange, kind english vowels, behind me asking if I was all right, if I going to be all right? "Yeah... no... I'm not... but I will be. I will be all right." Thinking how I didn't know where this place, somewhere in London, where I was leaving my blood and my embryo, actually was. Didn't know where I actually was...
And afterwards, long desolate months of the massive hormone fall, the bleedings I was glad to suffer. Knowing, at the end of it I would have my life back. And so it has been.
And now, with this Referendum, you tell yourself that this is not 1983? That's what you think, before the posters, the No-screaming naysayers, the singleminded absolutists come back again among us, roaring about unreliable, helpless, infantile women, who have terminated 'boys and girls' for 'social reasons'. Who must not the allowed' to choose. Not to choose. Never to choose. Choice, the final frontier for women in casting of being 'less than' womb bearers. In rejecting patriarchy, catholic control.
They come on from the Church, the IONA INSTIUTE, the Catholics. Maria Steen, David Quinn, Patricia Casey et al, directors named. You find the website. They describe themselves;
"The only organization in the world designed exclusively for top-ranking Catholic business-leaders and their spouses' Also 'The Iona Institute promotes the place of marriage and religion in society. We defend the continued existence of publicly funded denominational schools. We also promote freedom of conscience and religion'
Top Catholics then, (your everyday souls need not apply ) seeking to speak for us, act for us, choose for us, same as it ever was.
They scream like demons, when Google, Facebook ban adverts from abroad. They have the money, the power, still.
Will we let them do this again? Will we insist that our democratically elected government legislate as we direct, to regulate Abortion. Will we allow this Diktat to remain, this law beyond the reach of our laws, in the Irish Constitution. Will we let the catholic church or any other church continue to control what happens to women by stealth? By ruthless barracking, posters, lies?
Will you walk to polling booth on Friday, will your children walk with you, your people, your men, and vote for this, only this; for women's personhood, women's experience, women's choice, for women and only women's right to decide?
