Irish Abortion Referendum

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 609 Ratings

🗓️ 31 May 2018

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Following the landslide vote to overturn strict abortion laws in the Irish Republic, attention has shifted to Northern Ireland - the last corner of the British Isles to resist both legal abortion and gay marriage. The Prime Minister Theresa May is facing growing calls to bring the laws in line with the rest of the UK. It's a complicated political picture, but it raises a number of important moral questions. The first is about the extent to which a nation's religious and cultural traditions should be enshrined in its laws. Is it morally acceptable that Northern Ireland should have laws on abortion and same-sex marriage that are different from those in the rest of the UK? Can - or should - a government ever be neutral, or merely procedural, on substantive moral issues? Yet, the Irish referendum also highlighted a wider moral point about the concept of shame, and its complex relationship with respectability and institutional religion. Speaking about the scandal of Ireland's mother and baby homes, the former Taoiseach, Enda Kenny said: "No nuns broke into our homes to take our children. We gave them up because of our morbid and perverse pursuit for respectability." After the abortion vote, the current Prime Minister Leo Varadkar declared: "The burden of shame is gone". At what point does shame stop being corrective and start to become corrosive? Does it still have a useful role to play in society? From #MeToo to the public pillorying of greedy bankers and carbon-emitters, don't we still need the sanction of shame? Witnesses are Susie Boniface, Ed Condon, Martin Pollecoff and Prof Julian Savulescu.

Producer: Dan Tierney.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4.
0:03.6	Good evening. How our ideas of right and wrong can change.
0:07.2	A generation ago, a referendum in the Irish Republic resulted in a landslide vote
0:11.6	to ensure that abortion should continue to be banned in almost all cases.
0:16.5	Two out of three wanted to assert, as the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution put it,
0:22.7	the right to life of the unborn.
0:33.6	Now, only 35 years later, almost exactly as many have voted for the opposite, for abortion to be available on demand and without need for any reason in the early stages.
0:38.6	What was once seen as a moral bulwark of Holy Ireland was actually, according to one former Taoiseach, a morbid and perverse pursuit of respectability. Of course, the Catholic Church
0:44.7	in Ireland has been beset by scandal. The stories of mass cruelty to unwed mothers and their
0:49.4	offspring that have emerged have been heartbreaking. But the current Irish leader, Leo Varadka, sees a wider change in moral attitudes.
0:58.7	The burden of shame, he said, is gone.
1:02.2	Have things really changed so fundamentally, and if so, for the better?
1:05.9	Is respectability a vice now, not a virtue?
1:08.7	Is shame outdated and stigma collective cruelty? Or are they
1:13.5	both necessary to enforce private good behaviour and show public disapproval? And far from being
1:19.5	out of date, the movements like hashtag Me Too and the no-platforming of controversial speakers
1:24.3	show that shame is alive and well just aimed at different targets.
1:28.3	Who decides what those targets should be? Should religion have a role? And with Northern Ireland
1:33.6	still holding out against legalised abortion and gay marriage, at what democratic level
1:39.2	should politics translate morality into law? That's our moral maze tonight. The panel, Melanie Phillips, a social commentator on the Times,
1:47.2	Claire Fox from the Academy of Ideas,
1:49.0	Anne McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist,
	...

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