By DONALD DeMARCO
On October 3, 1995, O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murdering his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman. Cameras were placed in a shelter for abused black women to capture the reaction of these women at the very moment television informed them of the verdict. On hearing the news, the women burst into wild applause and loud, affirming cheers.
A little over a year later, on January of 1997, a civil court found O.J. Simpson liable for deaths of Nicole and Ron, and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to the families of the two victims. In hindsight, the cheers were emotional, premature, and ill-considered.
In May of 1962, in Liège, Belgium, Suzanne van de Put fed her eight-day-old severely handicapped child a lethal mixture of barbiturates. She was acquitted at the end of an eight-day trial. Daniel C. Maguire, in his book, Death By Choice describes how the verdict was received: “The thousand people in the courtroom erupted with joy at the announcement. The word spread to the waiting crowds outside, where a traffic-stopping celebration began. Trams rang their bells and drivers sounded their horns in approval.”
To the author’s credit, however, he does offer a caveat: “Uproar, of course, is a dubious moral index.”
Here is a caveat that should be taken to heart and applied to the “jubilant” crowds that recently celebrated Ireland’s overturning its protection for the unborn. The cheers that celebrate a victory on the soccer field are counterbalanced by the grim response of fans on the losing side. Cheering is ambiguous. And uproar is surely not a decisive indication of ethical behavior. Ethics demands a deeper look at things.
Author Stephen Vincent has a more reflective view on the Irish vote: “In a rush to be modern they have entered a time warp and come out pagan. They have crushed under foot the great pearl of the Catholic faith, which can never be expunged from the identity of Ireland.”
The vote had far-reaching ramifications well beyond a choice for abortion. In fact, the “choice” had already been made and recording it was merely an act of closing the account.
What were the sociological conditions in Ireland that preceded the vote? In an article entitled, “The Joyful Death of Catholic Ireland,” James Matthew Wilson remarks that given the recent upturn in Ireland’s economy, “The young were too busy earning money and spending it to have children much less to attend to the dissolution of Ireland’s Catholic culture.”
In recent years, Ireland’s birthrate dropped 20 percent from 2008 to 2017. Workers were brought in from Eastern Europe to fill vacant jobs. The rates of syphilis and chlamydia doubled while that of gonorrhea increased by a factor of four.
In Europe only the United Kingdom had a higher rate of sexually transmitted diseases. More than 500 new cases of AIDS were reported in 2017. In that same year unmarried women accounted for 40 percent of births. The adoption of contraception, divorce, same-sex marriage (which was also greeted with joy), and a loose life-style involving sex and drugs were logical preambles to the acceptance of abortion. The momentum was already in place and the conclusion was predictable. The final vote on abortion was not a surprise, nor could the cheering be justified.
An extensive study of religions throughout the world, covering 57 countries and five continents, reveals that of all the Western nations, the Irish are losing their faith the fastest. The Global Index of Religion and Atheism, a survey conducted by the Gallup International Association, shows that of all countries studied, only Vietnam is losing interest in religion faster than the Republic of Ireland.
Among the Irish who were surveyed, 44 percent said they were not religious and 10 percent claimed to be “convinced atheists.” Ireland is now among the top ten countries having this high a percentage of such atheists.
Ireland’s Mass attendance rate has plummeted from 82 percent in 1990 to 48 percent in 2016. Only 20 percent of people interviewed believed in the Church’s teaching that sex outside of marriage is immoral. Evidence indicates that many Catholics who believed that they could disagree with the Church on major issues and remain Catholic finally resolved this conflict by abandoning the Church altogether.
Jack Cashill, writing for the American Thinker (“Thoughts on the Descent of Ireland,”) was not one who was numbered among the cheering crowd. “The media,” he writes, “tell us Friday [May 25] in Ireland was a ‘great day for women.’ If they had a voice, those thousands of little girls to be killed in the womb just might take exception.”
Abortion is not good for women, within or outside the womb, as innumerable medical studies have shown. And if the politically correct scales from the eyes could be removed, women would see that abortion is actually a form of domestic violence. Irish crowds were cheering for an expansion of domestic violence (along with many other forms of violence, since the violence of abortion is imitated in so many different ways).
The words of Maria McFadden Maffucci, editor of The Human Life Review, stand far above the madding crowd: “We know what devastation legalized abortion has wrought to the U.S. — millions of unborn children dead, millions of mothers, fathers, and siblings wounded, and an increase in the societal ills it was supposed to ameliorate, such as child abuse, broken families, and poverty. Ireland could have led the world by learning from history, instead of being doomed to repeat it.”
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a Senior Fellow for Human Life International. His latest book posted on amazon.com is Why I Am Pro-life and Not Politically Correct.)
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