Caitlin Moran, 43, is a feminist columnist with The Times, to which I’ve subscribed for some years. I try not to read her pieces, because they always make me wish to cancel my subscription, and it’s a great paper if you can manage to avoid the articles penned by feminist journalists and columnists. On her Twitter account she introduces herself as:
Writing the fuck out of shit since 1992.
Ms Moran is possibly the most vacuous and narcissistic feminist “journalist” of her generation, and that’s saying something. In her bestseller How to be a Woman, Moran wrote about a family holiday in Cyprus (with their two daughters) during which she became pregnant because she and her husband couldn’t be bothered to use contraception. She subsequently had her unborn child killed, and mentioned in the book that it had been male. So, not human, then. We doubt that if it had been female, she would have mentioned its sex.
In two weeks’ time Ireland, a country very dear to my heart, will vote on whether to repeal the 8th Amendment and allow legal pregnancy up to the 12th week of pregnancy. I’m not religious, but if I were, I’d pray that the Irish people will vote NOT to repeal the 8th Amendment. In the UK women have killed 10+ million of their unborn children since the passing of the Abortion Act 1967. Every week in the UK, another 4,000+ unborn children are killed in what should be the safest place for them, their mothers’ wombs.
A piece by Moran in today’s Times, the highlighted comment towards the end (below) was what finally brought down the red mist, and prompted this blog piece. The woman has no moral compass – in former times she’s rightly have been denounced as evil – but of course the same could be said for all feminists. I shall be emailing her (caitlin.moran@thetimes.co.uk) to alert her to this blog piece. Her article:
The people who campaign against abortion, they must really respect motherhood. They must believe it is some kind of magic – that mothering is natural and easy, and that once a woman is prevented from seeking an abortion, she will slip into it capably, willingly and with grace. They must be so sure of this that they would create laws to stop her from terminating that pregnancy. Even if she was in an abusive relationship, or she herself was a child, or she had been told she would be terribly injured by the pregnancy and birth – they must believe that, however bad things get for this mother, she can overcome any adversity. They must believe women are incredible.
Incredible, but not clever. Not reasoning. Not able to analyse their own lives, make a decision that is in the best interests of them, their families and society as a whole. We know the statistics; we know the troubled people in our lives or making the headlines on TV. A mother who fails in mothering – who is traumatised, absent, ill or abused – is apt to raise angry, traumatised children, who in turn disrupt everyone around them.
“They were not mothered well,” we say of the destructive adult, the despairing adult, the self-loathing adult. “They did not have a good start in life.”
And yet there are countries where we do not allow mothers to wait until they can give their child a good start in life. We force them to carry to term babies they already know they will struggle to raise. We prevent them from getting older, wiser, healthier, more settled. We believe motherhood is a magic that will work anywhere; that a woman’s love, patience, time, sanity and money will, somehow, never really run dry. We believe that pregnant women are, in some way, superhuman.
But to believe that is not to be respectful to women and motherhood. It is to be utterly inhumane.
In two weeks, Ireland votes on whether to repeal the 8th Amendment and allow legal abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy. Currently, Ireland has the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe – it is illegal to seek an abortion even if your pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. [J4MB: We doubt these crimes account for even 1% of unwanted pregnancies.]
It is a cruel and unusual punishment to tell someone who has been the victim of a crime [J4MB: 99%+ of these women were NOT the victims of a crime] that, as a consequence of that crime, they must now carry their attacker’s child to term, labour to deliver it and then raise it, or else give it up for adoption. Rape in Ireland is punished with an average ten-year sentence. By way of contrast, the woman or child the rapist attacked will have to spend the rest of her life wrestling with an emotional paradox that even the greatest philosophers and psychologists would struggle with: comprehending that your blameless, unknowing child is the product of sexual hatred.
It is a cruel and unusual stance for a country to take – to insist that its women must, legally, grit their teeth and cope with whatever a single crime or mistake hands them. [J4MB: Ah. Crime or “mistake”. There we have it. Mistakes including women’s failures to take responsibility. God forbid women ever have to face the consequences of their actions or inactions.]
For that’s what this vote is, at its very core, in its bones: whether it will allow its female citizens the right to say, “I tell you this, now, in all honesty – I cannot be a mother. I am too young. I am too old. I am too tired. I am too poor. I am too traumatised. I am too scared. I have been told it might kill me, and I wish to follow the advice of my doctors. [J4MB: I couldn’t be arsed, like Caitlin Moran, to use contraception when having sex with my husband on holiday, so now taxpayers must pay for my resulting unborn child to be killed.] Contrary to what all the banners say, I am not someone who is careless, blithe and dismissive of the potential for life. [J4MB: The evidence would suggest otherwise.] It is the exact opposite – I am someone who values it so highly that I tell you now, in all truth: I would not be able to do this job properly. It would be a risk, a gamble. I wish to resign, before the stakes rise too high. There is no magic in motherhood. That is a lie. Just a female human being, here, saying, I can’t do this. I don’t want to.”
The rejoinder to this is often, “But if this all seems too much, could you not just give birth – and then have the child adopted?”
But this, again, does not respect motherhood. To live the rest of your life knowing there is a child of yours out there, being raised by others. Fearing every day she might be misunderstood; that he wonders who you are; that she wonders why you did not wish to keep her. [J4MB: He or she would much rather be killed in the womb, than cause you any anxiety over your decision. Got it.] Again, only someone blithely disrespecting of motherhood – of the minds and hearts of women – could believe you could let a child go so simply. That you could be legally ordered to make a child, against your will, then give it to others – and that this would be preferable to a safe, legal medical procedure, practised in two-thirds of the world, with not a single recorded negative effect to those societies. [J4MB emphasis. 10+ million unborn children killed in the UK alone – not “negative effects”? OK. Got it.]
This is not a risky change Ireland considers this week. It does not face potential economic or social peril. It is a small consequence, really: to finally, properly, respect motherhood and women. [J4MB: It’s time to finally, properly, respect unborn children.]
But that is everything.
Our positions on abortion and Foetal Alcohol Syndrome are in our 2015 manifesto (pp. 5-8).
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