Children in the USA, death by abortion or guns?

THE WAY THINGS ARE

By Colette NiReamonn Ioannidou

The governing coterie of Boris Johnson has repeatedly side-stepped political propriety under his lack of leadership. Their list of misdemeanors grew until this week they finally forced him to resign. Take the agreed legal Northern Ireland protocol that ended Ireland’s Troubles, which is now being disputed as if legality doesn’t matter. There are honorable men in the ‘Mother of Parliaments’ but to admiration-needy leaders like Boris and Donald Trump, self is paramount and getting away with wrongdoing mere proof of popularity.

Trump put his selfish ambition above the democratic freedom of US voters, given what appears to be his call to insurrection against the Capitol. Boris in the Ukraine is not a caring call, it’s his convenient Churchill Chapter. Both, despite lacking dignity and true leadership qualities, are still blindly adored by some.

And the exultant Trump Taliban are raising the rafters with their version of the Hallelujah Chorus since, in some American states, a repealed Roe V Wade has made abortion illegal as an almost blanket law, ignoring the fact that each decision is singular, framed by different circumstances. I doubt it’s ever straightforward to contemplate abortion, perhaps with the exception of a traumatised rape victim. Before Mother Ireland matured enough to ask her population instead of the Vatican, what they thought on matters concerning freedom of choice, Irish women were constricted in the above manner.

A relation was told her baby had severe complications and would die before full term. She was forbidden by law and religion to abort because a heartbeat was evident. Her anxious husband flew her to England where her deteriorating, life-threatening condition was met with medical disbelief. She was saved to have other healthy children.

Laws in some USA states may go so far as to make any kind of birth control illegal. And women who use states where abortion is still acceptable may face tracking and serious legal charges on return. On a BBC programme a professional tactician of an interviewer asked a Republican for his views. The right to life regardless, came up. When she mentioned the number of child deaths by weapons in America, he replied it wasn’t guns that killed most children there but abortion. Persisting with the weakness of gun laws, the comeback was … ’constitutional rights’.

When asked about a woman’s constitutional right to do with her body as she wishes. He replied, ‘That’s not a written!’ People like him, who consider themselves followers of Christ, don’t practice what He preached – ‘Judge not and you won’t be judged’. And ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ Not everyone believes in their or a god. An atheist friend scoffed, ‘They insist it’s murder to abort. Yet on whose Biblical orders were the Innocents in Egypt murdered, or all the little ones drowned when only Noah’s clan got the word to surf the tsunami?’ When God killed innocents, it wasn’t murder, she said, but it is via human birth control. ‘Don’t they say humans made in His image?’ Every child conceived must live, the self-righteous insist, regardless of whether it’s a viable life or that its presence may endanger a mother mentally or physically.

The BBC interviewee’s solution – carry it and have it adopted. Catholics everywhere are expected to breed like rabbits in a world where populations are becoming unsustainable, and it’s generally the devout poor who have too many children. Yet does the Vatican that tells them to keep having babies, dip into its deep vault to help them with a per child allowance? Their option? Virginity, abstinence or pregnancy. Church money in many Christian faiths, including Cyprus, means a show of opulence and business acumen.

Apparently, Christ’s reps on earth care more now for comfort and the accumulation of wealth in His name rather than following in the footsteps of their Master who had no possessions. Would the prolife folk assist poor women with big families cope with another baby? God provides, is a convenient answer. Does an arrogant man with a quality lifestyle who says keep a baby for nine months then adopt, consider how that will impact the life of a woman with no back-up cash and no support other than her job, particularly as health schemes in the States are far from perfect. Do the Christian Taliban all have big families to prove lack of birth control? An old saying goes: if a woman had the first and a man had the second, there wouldn’t be a third. Women had no say in the original Constitution, time for an additional amendment on the rights of women not to be told by men what to do with their very different bodies. As Joe Biden told free choice opinion, ‘It’s not over.’