If the Catholic church is prepared to ban Amnesty because of its stance on abortion, what other rights might it censure?
Zoe Williams
Wednesday September 19, 2007
The Guardian
The Catholic church in Northern Ireland has started a new policy of advising schools to disband their Amnesty International groups.So far, only one grammar school in Belfast has actually acted on this advice, having expressly sought it; but Irish bishops are planning to meet next month to discuss rolling out the policy to all schools under the church's umbrella.
The reason, predictably enough, is Amnesty's pro-abortion stance.
As happy as I am to defend the right to abortion to all women everywhere at any time, this is not the right moment to start tub-thumping about Catholics with regard to western women and their choices. This debate, conducted in the UK, where we have free access to abortion under law, usually turns into a statement of intent, or type - that is, I am the type of person who will think this type of thing. While I would fight to the death to defend our abortion laws and to attack any attempt made to shame or inconvenience the women who use them, I know it won't come to that. I admit this, I can afford to get aerated about it, about time limit debates and Ann sodding Widdecombe, because I don't believe the right seriously to be in jeopardy, so it's almost like a fire drill - all the thrill of a battle without actually getting shot in the leg.
Even in Ireland, where the situation is of course a hundred times worse and there are terrible injustices perpetrated against women, those injustices are not what Amnesty International is really talking about. The charity, to its discredit in my view - but this is a miniature criticism against a mountain of admiration - is rather softly-softly about this controversy. It certainly would not seek out points of disagreement with the Catholic church, especially given the two organisations' history of delicate cooperation punctuated by abortion-related flashpoints. But Amnesty has not gone looking for a fight. It says explicitly that its abortion policy is really aimed at the victims of rape and incest, and was developed with reference to the mass violations in war zones such as Darfur and Congo.
The figures on this are almost too outrageous to set down on paper.
Where abortion is legal, the maternal mortality rate is 0.2 per 100,000. In countries where it is illegal, the rate is 330 per 100,000. With an estimated 20 million abortions induced, worldwide, every year, that number of women dying - for stupid, pointless reasons, for reasons which boil down to unregulated, unsanitary conditions as often as not - is just suffocatingly unjust.
As is the way with these things, young women suffer most: 4.4 million women having abortions each year are between 15 and 19; the World Health Organisation says "it is believed that the majority of abortions for adolescents are carried out by unskilled staff in unsafe conditions". And these are global estimates, including developed countries where abortions are legal and gang rapes are not commonplace.
Broken down into region: in sub-Saharan Africa 70% of women who end up in hospital after an unsafe abortion are under 20; a study in Uganda showed that teenagers made up 60% of deaths from backstreet terminations. In short, while we are worrying about whether 15-year-olds should be allowed on catwalks, their peers in the developing world are trying to survive what amounts to a cull.
This is what Amnesty International is talking about, with a pro-abortion position - not bishop-baiting for the hell of it, but the unnecessary deaths of thousands upon thousands of vulnerable and usually very young women.This is what Northern Irish Catholics are saying, when they decide to wash their hands of involvement with the group. They're not turning their noses up at the whims and mores of the metropolitan faithless, they are saying: "Not only do we agree with this holocaust of teenage girls, we think these women are dying for a good reason. And furthermore, we think they're dying for such a good reason that we're prepared to halt this charity's activities even on behalf of vulnerable men, just to make a point." What do you say to an institution like that?
It's worthwhile to stop for a minute, here, and consider all this in the context of faith schooling. We all - all we feminists, I mean - have the odd qualm here and there about Islamic schools, and whether they invest proper rigour in the propagation of gender equality,
but Christians, we think ... now they're different. They provide a sound education, they don't discriminate on the basis of class, they're not exclusive, they've been doing this for years. They can have as much taxpayer money as they want.
It's balderdash. For a start, they are cherrypicking middle-class children (the Institute of Education at London University just produced this finding, after the most extensive research yet undertaken) and, much more important, in many cases they are prosecuting an agenda that is repugnant. Are we really happy to sit back and pay for this?
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