Pharisees of Abortion
“Sex sells but we refuse to admit that we have been bought and refuse to help those who are caught out.”
Both sides of this debate are posturing about the correct formulation of laws for this jusisdiction with respect to abortion. Neither of them is addressing the reality of the situation or the environment that brings these personal crises about.
I have not heard one voice raised to ask for better education about and services for sexual health at any stage in the proceedings. Nor have I heard anyone query the awful sexual culture that mis-shapes our self-awareness and our expectations of ourselves and others.
We choose to live with a ubiquitous and pervasive manipulative abuse of our psyches whereby sexual imagery is used to sell anything and everything possible. This constant presence of a distorted and perverted sexual undercurrent means that our wider sexual culture is also dysfunctional. This affects men and women differently but equally and makes it harder, much, much harder, for people to learn to respect, understand and enjoy their relationships and their bodies.
The evidence for this is everywhere around us. However, since people are affected inversely to their wealth and privelege, those most hurt have the least chance of having their voices heard or of effecting any change.
It is also true that we do not educate, formally or informally, our young, or ourselves, properly about this, literally, ‘vital’ subject. Rather we prefer to stumble around in a miasma of half-truths, religious dogma and haphazard experience and insist on passing this ‘fog’ on to our children.
The final hypocrisy is that we have abortion on demand in this country for those who can afford it but we avert our delicate sensibilities from this reality. So those unfortunate enough to have been caught out by the contradictions between our overtly sexual suggestive culture and our covertly delivered information and strictures are then abandoned by us and delivered up to whatever the ‘market’ enables them to do for themselves. Even as we reel from revelation to revelation about abandoned babies, about Magdalene laundries, about abusive priests and manipulative bishops, about corrupt politicans and greedy bankers and negligent civil servants it seems that we are refusing to learn from past mistakes or change our ways.
The teacher Jesus is recorded as having had many confrontations with the authorities of his day, known as the Pharisees. The constant refrain of these encounters was the Pharisees attempts to trip up Jesus on points of law whereas his concern was always for the wellbeing of the individual.
Whether it is in our refusal to assist those in mortgage slavery over a twisted intepretation of ‘moral hazard’ arguments, or our insistence on putting bankers and bondholders interests before those of the widows and orphans over a concern for the proprieties of contract law or our refusal to confront the cosy arrangements of the professional and administrative elites at the expense of those in their care and charge, it is clear that the Pharisees are in complete charge of every aspect of life in this jurisdiction of expertly honed “Irish solutions to Irish problems”.
A pox on both your houses, then.
