The Yes vote

To be a fully paid up member of the British cosmopolitan educated types, which I suppose I am, one’s options are fairly tightly delineated as far as opinions go. One has really no lea-way to harbour even a shade of doubt on the prevailing 'correct' opinions, and I must admit that this sometimes feels like something of a strait jacket.

Take this referendum in Ireland on abortion for instance. It is unthinkable for anyone in my circle to feel that abortion should be anything but totally optional and ‘a woman’s right’.

Now, if I were Irish, I would have voted yes. Because I think that it is untenable that Ireland should remain isolated with different laws to the rest of Europe. 

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t feel the whole question of abortion is deeply fraught.

When I was eighteen years old I had an abortion. At the time I cannot remember there was even the slightest question whether my boyfriend and I should keep the baby. That simply didn’t enter the equation. I come from Sweden. Abortion had been freely available there for decades. We just got rid of our baby as if it had been a case of brushing off a piece of fluff from the collar of my coat.

I  was never able to have a baby again. Something must have gone wrong somehow. That is of course extremely rare. I have not mourned the fact that I remained childless-but sometimes the thought crosses my mind: what if...? How would my life had looked if we had kept the baby? But we never even gave it a thought. 

I sometimes wonder how the living children of rape feel about the fact that everyone says that it should be an inalienable right for the mother to abort a pregnancy caused by rape.  Edward St Aubyn’s great Melrose novels may never be with us. He was the result of rape.  I know Tess of the D’Urbervilles is fiction, but I feel it has poetic truth: Tess called her child Sorrow but did not love her child less because it was spawned by rape.

A long time ago at one of my dinner parties in Islington the conversation around the table turned to the subject of abortion. Since we were all born before the 1967 Abortion act, it would not have been so easy to have been granted an abortion at the time of our birth.  A third of the people present said they thought they would simply not have made it into the world if abortion had been as readily available as it is now!

 My own case from Sweden is the opposite: my father died before my birth, before my mother knew of her pregnancy- probably a few hours after my conception.  They were to marry the following Sunday, but he was killed by a car accident.  So my mother found herself in the situation of  becoming  an unmarried mother. Blinded and half mad by grief she was taken to a hospital by my grandparents. She was given a paper to sign. She was just about to sign it without knowing what it was, but then something stopped her and she looked closer at the paper: it was her consent form to an abortion. She threw the pen away and screamed NO! apparently. That is why I am  here...