That Fornication Speech...

In yesterday's parliamentary debate on Abortion legislation in the Dáil, the speech of Mayo TD Michelle Mulherin attracted the most attention. Or, to be more precise, her use of a single word, namely "fornication" attracted people's attention.  It's not a word one hears too often, but it is usefully defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Fornication is carnal union between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman. It is gravely contrary to the dignity of persons and of human sexuality which is naturally ordered to the good of spouses and the generation and education of children. Moreover, it is a grave scandal when there is corruption of the young.

Anyway, Miss Mulherin said:

Abortion as murder, therefore sin, which is the religious argument, is no more sinful, from a scriptural point of view, than all other sins we don’t legislate against, like greed, hate and fornication. The latter, being fornication, I would say, is probably the single most likely cause of unwanted pregnancies in this country.

Now, fornication isn't a politically correct word, so this caused all kinds of uproar.  (It also caused Deputy Luke 'Ming' Flanagan to exclaim, "Hurrah for fornication," which could well serve as his next election slogan.) And even though fornication is a perfectly precise and accurate word for a particular sin, it's one that I don't use very often myself because it has an inflammatory effect which detracts from the calm and rational discussion of things.
Anyway, her speech - or at least the reported parts of it - have led to her being subjected to all kinds of online mockery, implying that she's typical of the pro-life Catholic crowd who want to send Ireland into an age of pre-enlightenment darkness.  However, if one actually goes to the bother of reading her speech - a thoroughly confusing contribution - it seems to me as though she doesn't represent mainstream pro-life thinking or Catholic thought and that her position on abortion seems to be a personal opposition, but an unwillingness to legislate for its illegality.  Indeed, reading many of the contributions made to the Dáil yesterday and the day before, many of them seem to base their opposition to Clare Daly's bill on pragmatic political grounds rather than on a principled concern for the life of the unborn.

On another online forum, a commentator made the astute remark about Mulherin's speech that it was written as though "two people with opposing view took turns writing paragraphs."
She starts by welcoming the debate and her concern for the Irish women who travel abroad for abortions.  Then she says:

We are moving and have moved away from an Ireland where morality was shoved down people’s throats. The question is whether responsibility for people’s moral conduct falls on the shoulders of Government or whether we go down the road of talking about the personal responsibility of the individuals involved.

She's raising a valid question here - albeit in an unsatisfactory manner.  One of the questions faced by legislators is the extent to which morality or good behaviour should be legislated for.  It seems self evident that the state should be allowed to forbid murder or kidnap or theft.  These seem to be the easy cases. Likewise, there is little appetite in modern Western democracies for the State to legislate to outlaw sexual misbehaviour in cases where consent can be responsibly given.   However, there are tougher questions.  What restrictions should the State place on cigarette smoking, drunkenness or pornography? What about drug-taking? The evaluation of what the State and criminal law can and can't do is a non-trivial question.  And whilst morality is often used in a pejorative sense (Is Mulherin doing this?), a legislator MUST reason in moral terms in order to decide what the State does or does not have the right to do.  
Questions of justice are moral questions, as are questions of human rights.  We are comfortable making the moral judgement that such-and-such a foreign state should not imprison political prisoners.  Whether we like it or not, that is a form of moral decision.  Likewise, the pro-life movement would argue that the question of what protection should be afforded to the unborn child is, of course, a moral one, but it is precisely the kind of moral question which the State must get involved in order to justly protect the human rights of mother and child.
Mulherin then goes on to make the fair point that hard cases make bad law.  Anyone with an iota of life experience know that difficult situations arise where we are torn apart by a whole nexus of competing thoughts, emotions and principles. Legal and moral decision making isn't easy and even though particular cases may sway us one way or the other, careful legislation cannot be based solely on particular "hard cases" without regard for underlying principles. She follows this argument (which you could imagine being taken from a pro-life briefing paper) with the following paragraph:

I will be voting against the Bill, which I believe is untimely. However, it does open a debate and I welcome that aspect. There are some questions I would raise during the debate. The major objection to abortion in Ireland is religious but the rest of the Western world has no objections in this way. In the book Free and Female, dating from some decades back, Ms Barbara Seaman put abortion as part of the lifelong struggle of women for effective contraception and to be able to take control of their own bodily integrity. That is both liberal and feminist. When we legislate, we do it with an all-inclusive paradigm for our society. In short, it is not for the majority alone.

Here she sounds, not like a conservative religious pro-lifer, but rather like someone in favour of enshrining abortion rights in legislation.  Her objection to the Daly bill is a question of timing. Her statement about Ireland's objection to abortion being uniquely religious is somewhat of a puzzler.  Yes, the vast majority of those who oppose the introduction of abortion to Ireland are Catholic and are motivated by their faith.  I suspect however that in the Western world, religiously motivated opposition to abortion is far from being uniquely Irish.  (Malta? Poland? The USA?)


However, even though religious people are opposed to abortion, their grounds for doing so are far from being simply religious. It's a question of human rights and the extent and manner to which human life should be protected by the State.  Most arguments against abortion are rooted in philosophical and scientific issues, rather than questions of scriptural interpretation and there are a fair number of agnostics and atheists who make common cause with their religious fellow-citizens in arguing for the right to life.In Catholic terms, opposition to abortion is rooted in the Natural Law and is not a religious stricture which we seek to impose on society, but rather a genuine injustice against another human being which the State has the right and responsibility to prevent. Our opposition to abortion is not akin to our suggesting that everyone should go to Mass on Sundays or face imprisonment, but is based on the exact same principles as the treatment of theft or kidnapping as illegal activities.

Anyway, having put forward an argument which seems to come from the pro-choice playbook, Mulherin then makes a sort of personal profession of faith which seems to be somewhat of a non sequitur: 

I am against abortion in any form. The grace of God is so liberating and provides so many options to get the best out of life despite our fallen nature, and we all have that. Having said that, it is an ideal to aim for. In an ideal world, there would be no unwanted pregnancies and no unwanted babies. However, we are far from living in an ideal world. An honest and a scriptural view is that things are getting harder for people, so what then for the weak in our society?

I'm not sure what Deputy Mulherin's religious background is. Certainly a belief in original sin and the power of God's grace is Catholic teaching, even if some of my online correspondents detect a US-style evangelical accent in her credo.  (I'm a fan of St Augustine & don't think we Catholics think enough about grace or original sin.)  She also makes a clear (personal?) statement of opposition to abortion, but leaves it unclear as to how that opposition should inform her legislative duties.  Likewise, her description of our less-than-ideal world raises questions... Does she mean to imply that because the world is fallen or imperfect that somehow we are held back from striving for the best because it is unattainable?  Are good and evil only relative categories in a less-than-ideal world?  Her self-expression is so unclear that it's hard to see what she's really getting at, but it doesn't sit well with me.  (That thing about "an honest and scriptural view" sounds like something an American fundamentalist would say.)Her next paragraphs speak about the 1st World becoming "freer and more autonomous." She presents a narrative of Ireland moving from a society legislating according to religious principles to one where such legislation is now unthinkable.  She then makes the statement which seems to give the clearest insight into her thinking:

Perhaps the Irish, like the rest of the world, are maturing to the point that they can be trusted with freedom of choice. In fact, although divorce became legal, marriage still remains very popular in Ireland and throughout the world, including the USA. It could be argued that when people are free to abort, they will fight harder to keep their unborn babies by choice and they will value their pregnancies. For those who do not, and I believe them a minority, they will be free to choose what to do with no legal pressure. In other words, any legislation will not make a good Catholic choose abortion against her conscience.

 Deputy Mulherin presents an Ireland where there is "freedom of choice" as being a more mature place.  She seems to loom forward to the day when the minority who do not "value their pregnancies" will be "free to choose what to do with no legal pressure." Despite all the controversy surrounding her, it seems to me that Deputy Mulhern falls into the camp of those who are personally opposed to abortion but who do not want to legislatively forbid it. So, all the mockery of her as representing religious pro-lifers is mis-directed. She sounds a lot more "pro-choice" than "pro-life."
  Finally, she concludes with her notorious fornication paragraph:

Abortion as murder, and therefore sin, which is the religious argument, is no more sinful from a scriptural point of view than all other sins we do not legislate against, such as greed, hate and fornication, the latter - fornication - being probably the single most likely cause of unwanted pregnancies in this country. At the end of the day, however, it is the nature of religion to fuss over appearances above the truth and the inner state of the person.

Mulherin puts abortion into the the category of sin - and based on that paragraph and her speech as a whole, it seems as though she understands "sin" as a purely personal matter, and not something that touches on the question of the human rights of others.  It's telling that she says,  it is the nature of religion to fuss over appearances above the truth and the inner state of the person - hardly the opinion of a mainstream Christian thinker, let alone the right-wing theocrat she is accused of being in various places on the internet. It's not my business to offer spiritual diagnoses over the internet, but it seems as though Deputy Mulherin has a curious understanding of sin and its relation to religion.  Sin seems to be something outlawed by a particular religion, very important to one's personal conscience, but not something at all to do with society in a broader sense or with issues of human rights.  She presents the general thrust of Ireland's social and moral changes in recent years in an unquestioningly positive manner, but above all, I think the weakness of her position - in as much as I understand it - is a total failure to consider the question of abortion as involving the rights of an unborn child.  


It's curious that Deputy Mulherin's use of the word "fornication" had the effect of triggering a tribalistic instinct. I've seen her praised by sincere Catholics (most of whom hadn't read her entire speech) for having the courage to call a spade a spade.  I'm not sure that many of them would have much time for the pro-choice argument Mulherin seems to be making.Similarly, speaking about fornication made her an ideal whipping-girl for many in the pro-choice world who could point to her as an example of pro-life Catholic ignorance from the backwoods of Mayo - an excuse to paint pro-lifers as being ignorant and insensitive zealots.  They totally pass over the fact that her speech seems to be that of someone who doesn't at all seem happy with the idea of legislative restrictions on abortion.     Anyway, I think the real thing to remember from all this is how poor the public discourse is in our country, especially where issues of religion are concerned and how unreliable a picture of things the media can paint.  Is there anyone out there in the mainstream media trying to give a true account of what Deputy Mulherin was arguing?