I don't think anyone could have predicted that one of the consequences of the defeat of the Catholic Church might be a renewal of the fight against abortion. And yet, as a result of that decline, we now seem poised to revisit some issues we thought had been disposed of by virtue of being "debated" ad nauseam since the 1970s, abortion being first among these. Dana Rosemary Scallon's election as an MEP is a sign that the post-Catholic abortion debate may be about to begin.
In truth there has never been a debate here about abortion. The debate that went on for nearly 20 years was about who should rule the moral domain, causing the Irish public to divide along polarised lines - conservatives versus liberals - with the church's line providing the central agenda. What was occurring was a war about power. The debate was really about the extent to which some of us were no longer prepared to submit to the church's teaching on anything.
This debate was driven by the extremes - a small rump who had decided that the church and its values had to be defended for their own sake, and an even smaller rump on the other side seeking, in accordance with their ideology of choice, to bounce us towards industrial abortion.
Caught in the middle, most of us were dragged this way and that - repudiating abortion in almost all circumstances but unable to hold fast to our convictions when presented with extreme situations and hypotheses. Many people, myself included, who had the gravest objections to abortion, shied away from stances which would align us with "reactionary" forces. Thus was created the unique character of Irish liberalism, distinguished not by positive assertion of individual rights but by the refusal to accept prohibitions imposed by Catholicism.
The manner of our dealing with the abortion issue to date, therefore, has been the result less of thorough and truthful exploration of the moral dimensions than of a desire to align ourselves alongside those with whom we have felt least uncomfortable. Now, with the church in retreat, it may be possible to separate the abortion issue from the imperatives of Catholicism and from the "liberal agenda".
One of the tricks liberals like to play is to place the allegedly three "liberal" issues - contraception, divorce and abortion - in a single package, with the assertion that the church's stance on all three represents encroachment on personal freedom. Perhaps the notion of things coming in threes has impressed itself inordinately on the liberal brain as a consequence of triumphalist delight at their success in laying on three-packs of condoms in every public toilet.
But in truth, there is no moral connection between the issues of contraception, divorce and abortion. The only connection is that the Catholic Church has opposed each of them with equal vehemence. Indeed, the fact that church personnel allowed themselves to get just as worked up about pieces of rubber as about the destruction of unborn children in the womb may have contributed in no small way to Irish Catholicism's now well-advanced demise. This also made it easier for liberals to imply that opposition to abortion is but another "conservative" fetish, which in turn edged us closer to a cultural acceptance of abortion.
All this, quite obviously, suggests both that the right to life can no longer be protected by the moral outlook of conservatism alone, and that we urgently require a new theology for the liberal society we have created. It has been interesting to observe, over the years of the supposed abortion debate in this State, how few voices have been raised in outright support of abortion.
Almost invariably, those on the alleged liberal side of the argument have couched their demands in terms of health issues, freedom to travel, rights to information etc. Liberals talk about being "pro-choice", rarely about being "pro-abortion", but no thesaurus I have ever seen lists "choice" as a synonym for "abortion". Neither am I aware of an abortion clinic offering its clients any "choice" other than abortion. The language of the abortion industry and its political mouthpieces is designed to sanitise what is proposed, and we have allowed their language to contaminate our debate.
Two decades of fudge, while never bringing us to confront the reality of abortion, have brought us inexorably closer to the availability of abortion in this State.
Yet another of the liberal tricks is to insinuate that the issue at stake is the removal of the alleged absurdity that, whereas Ireland seeks to prohibit abortion, terminations are readily available on the other side of the Irish Sea. This is an utterly fatuous argument, and would be seen as such if the issue was anything other than the emotive one of "crisis" pregnancy.
If, for example, someone were to argue that the availability of child pornography via the Internet was an argument for making it available in the corner shop, or for changing the laws and culture of our society to make such material more acceptable, their argument would be seen for what it was.
The fact that we are adjacent to a country in which "terminations" are conducted on an industrial basis does nothing to gainsay the moral arguments against abortion.
It is clear that a culture subjected to erosion by debate as woolly as the one we have been having about abortion gradually moves away from its pre-existing convictions and moves inexorably towards their antithesis. Subjected to debate which focuses on extreme hypotheses, and deems opposition to abortion ipso facto "reactionary", public attitudes, while remaining nominally opposed to abortion, inevitably become relaxed in respect of the taboos surrounding the subject.
Thus, ambiguity is allowed to creep in, and tolerance of abortion incrementally increased. A culture which at one time found the notion of abortion clinics unacceptable becomes gradually more convinced that their existence may sometimes be the lesser of evils in the interests of "compassion". It is then just a short step to widespread acceptance of legal abortion. The X and C cases of recent years have accelerated this tendency, creating a culture of the exception rather than of the norm.
We need, then, to develop a rigorous debate about abortion which is not about differing ambitions for the future of the Catholic Church, but about the precise moral meaning of abortion and the point at which we are prepared to draw our line. We need to begin looking at aspects of the debate which have so far been avoided: the shallowness of forms of compassion which embrace only women, the rights of fathers to protect their unborn offspring, the damaging effects of relaxed attitudes to "termination" on the broader ethics of our society, and so on.
We need, above all, to perceive that there is nothing necessarily "progressive" about supporting abortion, and nothing reactionary about objecting to the killing of a defenceless child in the womb.