God Wants You To Be A Coward

A woman died in an Irish hospital because the staff didn't know where they stood legally if they went ahead with the abortion that would have saved her life. So rather than risk prosecution, they just let Savita Halappanavar die.

The uproar sent the politicians into a legislative fever, composing new rules and regulations to bring Ireland out of the dark ages of women's health care. All that noise woke up the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, however, and now they have weighed in with their wisdom.

God wants you to run away says Monseigneur Jacques Suaudeau of the Vatican's main anti-abortion unit. Don't vote on the new abortion legislation that permits such things as saving the life of the mother over that of the child, politicians of Ireland. Just resign.

Don't be like the Nazis, blindly following orders. Run away. It worked so well during the war when the rest of the world was fighting and dying to stop the Nazis, didn't it?

Sure the man's French.

At issue is whether or not a woman would really and truly commit suicide like she threatens if she can't have the abortion. The Vatican says she's not to be believed, and they have studies to prove it. Or so says the Monseigneur. Why, to include a provision for suicide prevention in the new abortion law would be to normalize suicide! Then what would the suicide prevention people do if suicide was normal?

"If you see an act is evil," Msgr. Suaudeau says to those about to vote on the new law, "you cannot do it." Unless, of course, the evil act is to let a woman die as if her life does not matter. Then it's perfectly acceptable for an obstetrician to deny an abortion because maybe, just maybe, that fetus is still viable even if the mother has gone into septic shock.

And where does Enda Kenny stand on the issue?

He's as much as told the clergy that he doesn't tell them how to run their church and they don't have any business telling him how to run his secular government.

There was a time when the Irish government was largely a branch of the Catholic Church, and it's only in recent times that the horrors resulting from the arrangement have come to light. It is going to cost a phenomenal amount of money to repair the damaged psyches of the victims. The Irish people aren't going to stand by and allow the Church to have that sort of influence again.

And they aren't going to listen to a Frenchmen suggest that their elected officials turn tail and run away from a difficult issue that affects women only because they are the only half of the population that can ever get pregnant, no matter what laws a secular body might enact.