Something Political

I don't want to deviate from the positive, upbeat tone of this blog too much, but I don't want to go without saying something about the past week's 'abortion legislation' talks.

I am very concerned, some would say preoccupied, with issues of reproductive rights and, for want of a better term, sexual sovereignty. I wrote my Masters dissertation on sex education in Ireland, and it is my dearest hope that Ireland will one day be a country that isn't so overwhelmingly conservative, especially when it comes to the policing of womens' bodies. I hope to be able to work to aid this in the future.

For those not familiar with the proposed abortion legislation, the Wikipedia entry will give you all the background you require.That way you won't have to wade through all the careerist rhetoric from the politicians of Ireland.

Ireland has one of the most regressive sexual rights stances in Western Europe. That the Catholic Church is no longer solely responsible for this, but politicians such as Lucinda Creighton, who argued on the radio that her justification for being anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion (terms like pro-choice and pro-life are too narrow so I avoid them, and I have a problem with using the language of my enemy) was intellectual and not spiritual is but a small comfort.

As much as the austerity/recession rhetoric enrages me, it is a mere shadow of how angry I get when I read in the newspapers and hear on the radio the extensive media coverage, and hear hour after hour of bizarre rhetoric from women who might be expected to know better, and men whose opinion is unfounded and biased. This is a country where, last year, an actual female politician said crisis pregnancies were the result of fornication.

I am incredibly disappointed in this little country I was born in (but increasingly fail to identify with). I don't want to say anything too controversial, for in Ireland it is clear that abortion is still taboo. All I will say is that it makes me incredibly angry that the state and key legislators hides behind rhetoric, religious language or pseudo-science, and that politicians and political parties willingly uses womens' bodies to further their political agenda and garner public support.

It's 2013, and this needs to stop.