‘right to Life,’ Your Name’s a Lie! You Don’t Care If Women and Babies Die!

By Jane Cutter
Liberation
June 12, 2014

http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/right-to-life-your-names.html

If you want more proof that anti-abortion policies and politics have nothing to do with respect for the sanctity of life, look no further than Ireland and the recent discovery of the bodies of nearly 800 children in a septic tank at the site of a former home for unwed mothers.

Take a minute to think this over. Ireland, to this day, has some of the most restrictive policies on abortion in Europe. Since women are barred from having abortions, unwanted pregnancies are going result in many women carrying their pregnancies to term (obviously). For many years in Ireland, unwed mothers were sent to “homes” run by religious orders where they were forced to work and were separated from their babies. The so-called Magdalene Laundries were notorious for the abuse and virtual enslavement of thousands of women.

The children born to these women were kept in the homes as orphans and they too faced deplorable conditions, leading to a high mortality rate.

“Government records show that throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s, the rate was often more than five times that of children born to married parents. On average, more than one in four children born out of wedlock died.” (“Child graves prompt Irish to ask why so many babies died in Church care” MSN.com)

And in at least one “home” for unwed mothers, when babies and children died of malnutrition, gastroenteritis or other illnesses, their bodies were simply tossed into a mass grave in a septic tank.

It’s clear that this abusive treatment of single mothers and their children had nothing to do with caring about the lives of children and everything to do with controlling women and their sexuality.

While it seems like a nightmare from the past, the same values are expressed by modern day anti-abortion campaigners, not only in Ireland but here in the U.S. The anti-abortion right-wing here in the U.S. won’t be caught tossing the corpses of babies into a septic tank, but as they make abortion inaccessible with their incremental strategy of chipping away at Roe, they simultaneously cut funding for food stamps, welfare, education and other essentials needed for children to live a healthy life.

Let’s throw these right-wingers into the septic tank of history!