It is indefensible the way the latest Journal.ie “fact-check” has allowed Holly Cairns’ recent misleading remarks on abortion to slide. “Fact-checking” as a media function loses credibility if it appears to let people off the hook rather than hold them to account. For Journal.ie to conclude that the Social Democrats leader’s recent Dáil contribution did not amount to misleading remarks is a considerable stretch.
The context in which Holly Cairns raised the approximately 240 Irish women travelling to England each year for abortion was unmistakably clear. In her remarks, she focussed exclusively on the issue of abortion in cases involving babies with a life-limiting condition (“fatal foetal abnormality”) and never clarified that the 240 abortions also included abortions on other grounds.
This was central to the claims the Pro Life Campaign made about Ms Cairns misleading the Dáil. It’s a position we stand over and we have drawn the attention of this to Members of the Oireachtas.
Around two-thirds of the 240 abortions Ms Cairns referred to were carried out under Ground C (the so-called abortion-on-demand grounds, which are also legal in Ireland). By contrast, over a five-year period from 2019 to 2023, a much smaller total of eight cases involved babies diagnosed with anencephaly, Edwards syndrome or Patau syndrome.
These facts matter, particularly in the context of the ongoing debate over abortion in Ireland, as politicians push for the grounds for late-term abortions to be widened further while ignoring Ireland’s soaring abortion numbers, which reached 10,852 in the latest recorded year.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised at Journal.ie’s conclusions when, in their response, they referred to abortion as “treatment” and allowed terms like “abortion care” to go unchallenged, while in reality all that abortion accomplishes is ending the life of an innocent and defenceless unborn child.
Unfortunately, like many proabortionists, Ms Cairns would be of the mindset, why let the truth get in the way of a good story?
The whole abortion “story” is based on lies and rationalising. What passes as normal now would have caused rte to be burned down in the 60s if they tried to sell what was happening in Britain, for example, when they legalised abortion in 1967. The analogy of the frog in the pot of water with the temperature gradually turned up, comes to mind. Or the camel getting it’s nose under the tent.
Abortion prevention requires attention to two matters:
1. The mindset of 11,000 (and rising) women annually to destroy their unwanted child
2. To make such destruction legally impossible.
Both matters surely should be the focus of our attention, not just the second. The first is surely related to the melting down of the once ‘adamantine’ security of support for child-bearing that was provided by the institution of marriage. Until that structure is rebuilt the plague of abortion is surely inerradicable?
Holly Cairns and Kitty Holland the ugly side of journalism and politics.