Would I still vote for abortion today? I’m not so sure

I once had a red-haired, Irish Catholic girlfriend … but I’m okay now.

She was born in a town in Northern Ireland less than 100km from where my father grew up – yet we met next to a pool, during a drunken party, 10 000km away, in Africa.

It ended, inevitably, with slammed doors, angry words and tears. On both sides. Always, in the background, was the Catholic Church.

The fact that her father was a Catholic meant he couldn’t get work as a heavy-current electrician in Ulster, because the jobs were reserved for Protestants. So he had to feed his family – wife and three young daughters – by working abroad; first in Saudi Arabia and then in Zambia and the former Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).

I was raised in the church and was an altar boy for a while. Really. I have since heard the old saying that if you give a child to the Jesuits (the most stern brothers in the church) for the first seven years of its life, it will remain a Catholic for the rest of it.

Our parish priests were Carmelites, the most laid-back in the church – Catholic hippies almost – yet the influence of Rome ran deep.

As I grew older, I began to question and drift away. No more mass, certainly no more confession. It seemed to me that the church was so out of step with the reality of modern life.

One morning, in bed with the aforementioned redhead (with no intention of going to mass), we had a lively, and quite intellectual discussion (yes, really) about why the church was losing people like us. We were sinners. Not only for the obvious, but for the fact we were using contraception … which the church regarded as tantamount to murder, because it was preventing a life coming into the world.

We believed then, and I still do, that is absurd and I am glad to see that today’s pope does not condemn people to the fires of eternal hell for using the pill or condoms.

When I was younger, and I imbibed the heady liberal ways of the world, I also felt that abortion should be a decision left to a woman because it was her body involved. I did think, though, that I would like to be consulted, because half of any new life would be mine.

Fortunately, that situation never arose. I was torn to see the referendum in Catholic-dominated Ireland this weekend on changing the country’s constitution, a section of which outlawed abortion.

Just on two-thirds of the country voted to remove that section, allowing the government to legalise abortion. The vote is being hailed as a victory for modernisation and a significant reduction of the influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

Would I have voted yes? My twenty-something alter ego would have. Going on four decades later, I’m not so sure. A friend of mine put it simply: it may be a woman’s body involved, but effectively, it returns to normal after the abortion.

It is exactly the opposite for the foetus.

Maybe because I’ve seen too much death in my life; maybe because I now realise what lies ahead is less than what is behind, but I know life is precious. And children, no matter how much they put you through an emotional wringer at times, are a blessing. And that’s talking as a human being, not a Catholic.

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