'Non-violence lacks appeal of quick-fix cures

During the past week the US Senate voted to ban partial-birth abortion, meaning that it only remains for President Bush to sign it into law, which he will be happy to do, writes Breda O'Brien

The doctor who pioneered partial-birth abortion, Dr Martin Haskell, described the late-term procedure in 1992 in a medical journal. It involves manual dilation of a woman's cervix over several days to four centimetres.

The doctor then grasps a leg or legs through the cervix and engineers a breech delivery. He pierces the skull of the foetus, still inside the mother's womb, with scissors and suctions out the brains, allowing the skull to collapse and the delivery of a dead foetus.

The US Congress voted twice before to ban this procedure, but President Clinton vetoed the ban twice. He claimed it was needed to save women's lives. In fact, deliberately causing a breech delivery, along with the risk of perforation of the womb due to the use of a sharp instrument within it, makes partial-birth abortion a highly dangerous procedure.

Last week also, Florida's Governor Jeb Bush ordered a feeding tube to be restored to a woman, Terri Schiavo, whose husband had succeeded in winning a judgment which would have allowed her death by dehydration and starvation.

Her parents contend that Terri, although severely disabled, is responsive, and that she should be allowed to live. Jeb Bush used emergency legislation to allow him to overrule the judgment, and potentially to save this woman's life.

Naturally, scorn is being poured on both Bushes. There are plans to test the new legislation in the Supreme Court the moment it is signed into law. Jeb Bush is being sneered at for being sentimental about Terri Schiavo, given his position on the death penalty. There is a large overlap between those attacking the Bushes now and those who vehemently opposed the war in Iraq.

Frankly, I don't understand how a person could oppose war, or sanctions which result in the death of children, but still oppose the banning of a truly barbaric procedure like partial-birth abortion.

If, for some activists, non-violence is the preferred path to conflict resolution, how can it be right to resolve an apparent conflict between the rights of a woman and the child in her womb by violence?

Nor can I understand how people can march on behalf of civilians in Iraq and at the same time advocate taking away food and water, even if delivered by tube, from a woman who smiles and cries and makes attempts to speak, as Terri Schiavo does.

But then I don't understand the Bushes either. I don't get how they can see so clearly that it is barbarous to partially deliver a baby very late in pregnancy and then kill him or her, but also be capable of sanctioning the execution of mildly mentally handicapped adults.

For that matter, if human life is sacred, then it surely deserves protection, not just in the womb, but from depleted uranium and daisy-cutter bombs, too?

There are other things I don't understand. For example, the rhetoric around a woman's right to choose sits very comfortably with an individualistic, consumer-driven mentality, where choice is the supreme value.

In this view, other considerations must take second place to an individual's right to freedom, even when the "other considerations" are the right to life of another, very small, human being.

Yet the very people who despise consumerism, not only for what it does to the planet, but for what it does to human beings, will march for a woman's right to choose to terminate life. By the way, I am not suggesting that women choose abortion for ideological reasons.

Research, including the Irish Trinity study on abortion, shows that women choose abortion because it seems to them to be the least bad solution. My argument is not directed at women who, in difficult circumstances, choose abortion for lack of a better option. It is directed at those who, by advocating abortion, seem to me to suffer from ideological inconsistency.

On the other hand, it was very difficult to watch some people here in Ireland who have been courageous in the anti-abortion movement being at best ambivalent about, and in some cases actively in favour of war in Iraq.

Somehow, any deviation on matters of sexual morality lays one open to a charge of being an a-la-carte Catholic, but opposing the Pope's clear stance on this war does not. The argument that the Pope's example on Iraq did not touch on a fundamental matter of faith or doctrine is weak at best.

While the Catholic Church still allows for the possibility of a just war, there is a growing body of thought that it may not be possible for a war to be just when a civilian population will suffer as the Iraqi people have done.

There are some groups who favour non-violence in all circumstances, like the Consistent Life Ethic Network, who would rejoice at Jeb Bush's decision to reinstate Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, while lambasting George Bush's recent pronouncements in Bali, where he made approving noises about the Indonesian government.

This is the same Indonesia which only recently released East Timor from its clutches and is repeating some of the same kind of crimes that it committed in Timor in the Indonesian province of West Papua. But then, very few people have heard of or care about West Papua.

There is no doubt that non-violence does not have the immediate appeal which quick-fix solutions appear to have. It is an enormously demanding road, as we know only too well from the situation in the North. Yet, given our history in this country, the alternative seems even more dreadful.

Perhaps the real failure of those who advocate non-violence is that they have failed to ignite the popular imagination by showing that, whether it be in the small-scale violence of abortion, or the large-scale violence of war, there is a practical and viable better way.

On the North, at least, we have decided firmly that, however long it takes, that violence is never the answer. The pity is that the same consensus is so absent on other issues.