Who’s funding Ireland’s abortion lobby?

by David Quinn

posted Thursday, 28 Sep 2017

Ireland's Prime Minister Leo Varadkar (Getty Images)

   

Numerous international groups are trying to influence Ireland into legalising abortion

The great and the good internationally have a big interest in the outcome of Ireland’s looming abortion referendum, planned for next year. They want Irish voters to erase from their constitution the so-called Eighth Amendment, which gives the unborn child the same right to life as every other human being.
Abortion is only permitted in Ireland when the life of the mother is at real and substantial risk. This amendment was inserted into the constitution following a referendum in 1983 which passed by a two-to-one margin.
Ever since then secular liberal opinion has been bent upon overturning that referendum. When liberals lose a referendum, they do not take no for an answer and Irish liberals have found plenty of allies abroad in their quest for change.
Among those allies is the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, various United Nations committees, including the UN Human Rights Committee and the UN Committee against Torture (yes, torture), in addition to the billionaire George Soros.
Through his Open Society Foundations, the Hungarian-born Soros has already provided three pro-abortion groups in Ireland, including Amnesty International’s Irish branch, with a combined total of around $400,000 (£295,000). The other two groups are the Irish Family Planning Association and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
A leaked document from the Open Society Foundations revealed the reasons behind the funding. It said it was so that the three groups could “work collectively on a campaign to repeal Ireland’s constitutional amendment granting equal rights to an implanted embryo as the pregnant woman”.
It continued: “With one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, a win there could impact other strongly Catholic countries in Europe, such as Poland, and provide much needed proof that change is possible, even in highly conservative places.”
That pro-abortion groups in Ireland are receiving foreign funding has received very little media coverage and almost no political reaction. This is despite journalists and politicians showing a permanent interest in alleged foreign funding of Irish pro-life organisations. The lack of curiosity in foreign funding of pro-choice outfits says a lot about the double standards of the Irish media and many politicians.
In any event, the reason the Open Society Foundations gives for providing the funding – namely that turning a once strongly pro-life country into a pro-abortion country would serve as an example to other countries – is also the reason why Justin Trudeau and the UN see fit to comment on our pro-life law.
When Trudeau met the new Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, in Canada recently, he brought up the Eighth Amendment and indicated that Ireland should repeal it in the name of “human rights”. There is no indication that he met with any resistance from Varadkar or that the Taoiseach criticised Canada’s extremely permissive law, which allows abortion for any reason right up to birth and gives scant conscience protections to doctors and nurses.
Varadkar describes himself as “pro-life” but favours repeal of the Eighth Amendment where a woman’s health is considered to be at risk. This ground will be very familiar to British readers who know it has led to abortion on demand in their country and almost 200,000 terminations per annum.
The UN has regularly been putting its oar in, encouraged by Irish pro-abortion groups. Ireland, like Britain, is a signatory to numerous UN treaties, and again like Britain, must periodically appear before this or that UN committee to report on how well it is implementing various treaties.
Again and again we are told that we must permit abortion. These UN committees are very ideologically biased. They have long since been co-opted by the pro-abortion Left and they are more than happy to dance to whatever tune Irish abortion groups choose to play. The committees never consider the rights of the unborn child. They pretend that whatever UN treaty or convention they are charged with overseeing permits abortion. This is despite abortion getting no mention in any UN treaty or convention. These same committees then give the false impression that their opinions carry a legal weight they simply do not have.
Depressingly, Irish governments tend to tip the hat to these committees and treat them with a wholly undeserved deference. This suits the present government, of course, because it wants to see our pro-life law overturned. It is therefore convenient for it to pretend to the Irish people that “we are letting ourselves down” in the eyes of the international community, led by the UN, and that the UN is somehow the unbiased and objective arbiter of morality. In fact, the UN acts as a sort of Magisterium to those of a secular liberal persuasion. It cannot be questioned. The UN has spoken, the matter is closed.
Why are these international figures really so determined to see us change our abortion law? The charitable explanation is that they genuinely believe in the right to abortion and that the child in the womb has few if any rights. Many do obviously believe this.
But the less charitable explanation is that they know that Ireland’s law, and Ireland’s still reasonably strong pro-life culture, is a standing rebuke to the abortion laws and the pro-choice culture that exists in practically every other Western country, including Britain.
In the UK, one pregnancy in every five ends in abortion. In Sweden, it is one in four. The Irish rate is about one in 18 pregnancies, even allowing for the roughly 3,500 Irish women who travel to Britain each year to have an abortion. In other words, Ireland shows that when a country has a highly restrictive abortion law, far fewer abortions take place even when a near neighbour permits abortion and women can easily travel there.
But surely, some say, our abortion law means that more women die in pregnancy? This is not the case. The Irish maternal death rate is somewhat lower than the British one.
Against this, you may have read about the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar who died in an Irish hospital in 2012 after being refused an abortion. But it transpired that she died of sepsis and the hospital had not spotted the deadly infection until it was too late. If it had known she had sepsis, it could have ended the pregnancy, which was miscarrying in any case. In British hospitals pregnant women also die from sepsis on rare occasions. Britain’s very permissive abortion law does not save them.
Given that the Irish law is such a challenge to the abortion regime in most Western countries, you can see why big international players want Ireland to change its law. The Irish law has saved the lives of countless unborn babies while also protecting the lives of pregnant women. That is a win-win. Ireland should be proud of its law. Other countries should be ashamed.
Will we be able to resist internal and external pressure to change our pro-life culture? We are likely to know by next summer because the referendum will have taken place by then.


David Quinn is a columnist with The Sunday Times and The Irish Catholic. He is the founder and director of The Iona Institute (ionainstitute.ie)
This article first appeared in the September 29 2017 issue of the Catholic Herald. To read the magazine in full, from anywhere in the world, go here

This is Why Bob Dylan’s Genius is Biblical

This is Why Bob Dylan’s Genius is Biblical

BOB DYLAN ... 1966

Blogs  |  Sep. 28, 2017

Dylan’s art is often informed by Scripture—and the idea of returning to the sources for insight and progress is itself a biblical idea.

Francis Beckwith

“I can hear a sweet voice gently calling
Must be the Mother of our Lord.”
—Bob Dylan, Duquesne Whistle (2012)

I first discovered Bob Dylan in 1976 while rummaging through a satchel of cassette tapes owned by my cousin, Peter Casella, who had inadvertently left it at my parents’ home. The album was Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. I was 15 years old at the time, with my music listening habits dominated by the great pop acts of the late 1960s and mid-1970s: Wings, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, the Beatles, the Byrds, Elvis Presley. I was not prepared for Dylan.
Because somebody had already listened through Side One, I plopped the cassette into the machine and began with side two, which starts with Mr. Tambourine Man. I had heard the Byrds’ Beatle-beat, Wrecking Crew, highly abridged version of the tune. So, I expected to hear from Dylan something similar. But it wasn’t even close. His performance just knocked my socks off. It had a sound I had never heard before, but yet it seemed as familiar as Happy Birthday or God Bless America. Or as Izzy Young would put it, by “writing about contemporary ideas in traditional forms” he sounded “current and old at the same time.” Central to Dylan’s “sound” were the words and his cadence while singing them. I could not believe that anyone could do something like that in popular music. I know that some of the old Tin Pan Alley lyricists were accomplished wordsmiths, but could any of them really have pulled off anything like this:

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming

After returning the satchel to my cousin, I forgot about Dylan until late August 1978 when I was driving through Utah on my way to Pocatello, Idaho. I happened to be listening to a radio station that every weekday selected an entire album to be played during the lunch hour. On that day it was Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. As I listened, I recalled my initial hearing of the album two years earlier, and wondered why I had not explored Dylan’s larger body of work. That was quickly remedied.
About a year later, Dylan released the album, Slow Train Coming (1979). It was evident from the songs’ lyrics that Dylan had undergone a profound religious conversion to evangelical Christianity. This caused quite a stir in popular culture and the entertainment press. Many were scandalized, largely because of what Dylan had represented to the counterculture movement of the 1960s. He had pretty much written the songs that would become the unofficial anthems for social change in America, even though Dylan himself bristles at the “spokesman of a generation” moniker. (These songs include Blowin’ in the Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Only a Pawn in the Game, Masters of War and Chimes of Freedom.) To embrace Evangelical Christianity, which by 1979 was beginning to be associated with the religious right, was a bridge too far for many of Dylan’s most devoted fans.
This, of course, was not the only time he had ticked people off (or, at least, surprised them).
In the mid-1960s, after releasing two albums that included several folk songs that were appropriated by the civil rights and anti-war movements (clumsily labeled “protest songs”), Dylan moved on to pen more abstract, surreal and “stream of consciousness” compositions, among them Mr. Tambourine Man, Gates of Eden, My Back Pages and It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).

He showed up at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and “went electric,” much to the chagrin of the folk music purists in the audience who booed him. A year after releasing the double-album masterpiece, Blonde and Blonde (1966), for which Dylan used some of the finest studio musicians to help create what he would call that “thin, wild mercury sound,” he released John Wesley Harding (1967), an album that seems pared-down and basic in comparison to its predecessor. It includes many biblical and religious allusions that Dylan biographers speculate were the result of regular Bible reading he had taken up at the time.
Although often considered a man of the political left, Dylan wrote in his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, that in the 1960s his favorite politician was Barry Goldwater. In 1969, he gravitated to country-western music and released Nashville Skyline. And in the past of couple of years he has released albums consisting exclusively of standards from what some call The Great American Songbook.
Behind these (and other) seemingly inscrutable transformations is a consistent theme, which I like to call, “Bob Dylan’s biblical genius.” I think Izzy Young caught a glimpse of it when he first heard Dylan’s first compositions and said that they sounded both “current and old at the same time.”
There is in Dylan’s artistic journey a continual return to the sources: Scripture, the folk tradition, American standards, Great Books, etc. For Dylan, these are not merely museum pieces to be dusted off so that we can appreciate (and perhaps admire) our primitive ancestors. Rather, they are, as he said of St. Augustine, “alive as you or me.” They serve as both guidelines and raw material from which one can compose new lessons from perennial truths. This requires that one deny the modern fetishes of moral innovation and cultural debunking while at the same time rejecting the traditionalist reflex to be skeptical of all change and dissent. This is precisely what I believe Dylan is doing in his so-called “protest songs.”
In his early days, he clearly connected the progressive cause of civil rights to a return to those biblical ideals of justice and fairness that everyone, down deep, knows are true. So much so that they are “blowin’ in the wind,” “the first one now will later be last,” and for those who suppress the truth, “like Pharaoh's tribe they'll be drownded in the tide, and like Goliath, they'll be conquered.”
Dylan’s most recent album of original material, Tempest (2012), takes its name from Shakespeare’s play and includes a song about the sinking of the Titanic (“Tempest”) that serves as a metaphor for the hubris of the modern world and the divine judgment that is sure to follow:

The captain, barely breathing
Kneeling at the wheel
Above him and beneath him
Fifty thousand tons of steel

He looked over at his compass
And he gazed into its face
Needle pointing downward
He knew he lost the race

In the dark illumination
He remembered bygone years
He read the Book of Revelation
And he filled his cup with tears

Dylan’s genius is biblical, not simply because his art is often informed by Scripture, but because the idea of returning to the sources as a necessary condition for insight and progress is itself a biblical idea: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Matthew 5: 17). “So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15)
On Nov. 3, Columbia Records is releasing, Trouble No More (2017), a boxed set of live recordings and studio outtakes from Dylan’s so-called ‘Christian era” (1979-1981), the period that included Slow Train Coming and two subsequent albums in which he sings explicitly of his newfound faith. This extraordinary collection will no doubt revive questions about Dylan’s personal journey, whether or not he still identifies as a Christian.
As a Catholic, I certainly hope he does. But as a fan, I am content with sitting back and listening to his biblical genius. 
 
Francis J. Beckwith is a professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. His most recent book is Taking Rites Seriously: Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2015), winner of the American Academy of Religion’s 2016 Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Constructive-Reflective Studies.