Keeping It

You’ve heard it too in tv dramas and comedy shows – ‘are you going to keep it’? In Gavin and Stacey on Netflix the obese pregnant woman decided to ‘keep it’. She had watched Vera Drake (pre ’67 abortionist film) twice before coming to her decision. The story formula then :- I’m pregnant – Who’s the father – Smithy (an obese man) – Are you going to keep it?

In the latest series of the Scandanavian show The Bridge Saga Noren (autustic genius detective) tells her partner and lover that she is pregnant with his child and that she is going to take it out. He asks – do I have any say in this? Dark Scando irony there.

These questions and assumptions hang in the air like an evil mist that we daily breathe in to prepare us for the reality that is prowling about in the careless shrubbery of our lives. It was then easy for the Repeal the Eight campaign to pit the mother against the child in the womb. An argument in the past against abortion was that things would be different if women’s stomachs were made of glass and the activity of the child could be seen. There were scan photos on innumerable utility poles during the campaign but they seem not to have made much difference. Obviously they were of somebody else’s baby.

Hard cases dominated the YES campaign. In an inversion of trolley triage 97 would be sacrificed to ‘save’ 3. Yes we are now in a different country where the increase in abortions that is certain to follow this result is greeted with jubilation in the square at Dublin Castle.

On Sunday we walked up Mamin to St. Patrick’s Well, a place of pilgrimage. It’s peaceful there at the top of the hill. The stations of the cross are simple with the titles in the Irish language. An interesting difference between them and the English is the present tense reflexive which is used which seems to me stronger than the continuous present. Leagtar Iosa – Jesus is knocked down not Jesus Falls for the First Time.