Poet Writes to Priest; Let’s Free the Slaves of Mankind

I think you won’t like this letter. I am writing to you about the abortion laws. My own thinking may not correspond with the main climate of Catholic thought. But the terrible thing about the main climate of Catholic thought is page 481 that it tends to be punitive at the drop of a hat. It made us harry and murder Jews in the past. We knew they belonged to the Devil because they weren’t christened.

Every good Catholic knows the Sign of the Cross at Baptism drives the Devil out of the child. I mean, we did know for certain till we learned different.

Every good Catholic knows that homosexuals are very bad indeed. God sent down a rain of fire on Sodom because there were homosexuals living there. We knew that practising homosexuals brought a terrible curse on the country where they lived. I beg your pardon, Father, we did know till we learned different.

Now we know that the ancient midrash which the tribes of Israel constructed from the depths of their communal thought after a town was swallowed up by an earthquake meant something different. It made a strong point in moral theology. It made the point that to insult the guest and the stranger is very much contrary to the will of God. Now most priests speak gently in the confessionals to the few homosexuals who come to them. Our persecution of homosexuals has begun to be a thing of the past. At least I hope it has.

Is it entirely an accident, Father, that Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Diem all came originally from the Catholic stable? We Catholics are so sure of ourselves when we have the guns and the wrath of Jehovah behind us.

I prefer to cool it, Father. Too much blood has flowed under the bridge. You said to me last night: ‘Everybody knows that abortion is murder’. Here is one Catholic who doesn’t know. I think it highly probable that a foetus is a child in an early stage of development. But I can’t know for sure. A deep gut feeling on the matter is not enough to go on. Deep gut feelings, along with a simplicist theology, told us that Jews and homosexuals belonged to the Devil. They tell a good many of us the same thing nowadays about the Communists.

I think Hitler was carrying out the subconscious instructions planted in his mind by a simplicist Catholic education when he started to eliminate those three categories of human beings from the right to be alive in Germany.

Let’s not rush our fences. Deep gut feelings can cause a lot of trouble.

What do the Catholic demonstrators mean who parade their smallest children with placards in their fists that say bluntly, ‘If abortion were legal, I might not have been born’? Logically it must mean that only fear of punishment under the abortion laws prevented their demonstrating Catholic parents from killing them when they were foetuses. I didn’t know the demonstrators had so strong a wish to abort foetuses. I don’t like to see my fellow Catholics making idiots of themselves and of the Church.

Don’t get me wrong, Father. I am not advocating abortion as a solution to even the gravest social difficulties.

An old friend of men, who doesn’t like the Catholics because they persecuted the Jews, and who has a husband and children of her own, said page 482 to me recently: ‘The law solves nothing. It just drives people underground. I am against abortion. I have personally persuaded a number of girls not to have abortions. But I think the abortion law should be off the books.’ I think we should begin listening to women. They have something to say to us about abortion. Some say to us: ‘If I am bearing a child, that child is a living being and also part of me.’ Others say to us: ‘I want freedom to decide without being labelled a criminal whether or not I will give birth to a child I have conceived.’

The word freedom should make us prick up our ears. When people use that word it generally means they are trying to make some real point in moral theology. It generally means they feel they are being treated as slaves and want a different social and moral status. A man, married or unmarried, is quite capable physically and socially of impregnating a woman who doesn’t love him and who doesn’t want to bear a child. The woman stands in somewhat the same relation to him that a slave does to the slave-owner. In that situation a woman who has been impregnated is likely to say to herself: ‘I don’t want to have a child I didn’t choose to have.’ She may even say to herself, ‘I don’t want to bear a child which may itself be in a state of slavery.’ In either case it may seem to her the lesser evil to kill the foetus. I think this is the message which the Women’s Liberation movements are trying to convey to us. The abortion issue is closely connected to the issue of equal status for women.

Germaine Greer had a convent training. She would know in the marrow of her bones that the Catholic Church does not in practice grant equal status to women. If we were pushing for equal status for women in the Church and in society at large with the same energy with which we push to keep the abortion laws on the books, then the women who don’t listen to us might begin to listen to us. The voice of the slave-owner is never sweet in the ear of the slave. Germaine Greer is nobody’s slave. But her Amazonian mentality was certainly developed with no help from the Church at all.

I must present you with an analogy. In certain Eskimo tribes, when they are going on a journey and the food supply for the tribe is insufficient, they build igloos for the old people and leave them there to die. This act is undoubtedly murder. Yet if the State punishes them for killing the helpless old, it is acting unreasonably, because the incentive to kill the old people remains unchanged. If the State does intervene, it would have to provide massive social remedies.

The women who desire abortions fall into two classes. The first group are unmarried. An unmarried girl may wish to give birth to the child which she has conceived. But the social stigma she has to bear may be enormous.

As an Irishman you will recognise, Father, that the greatest heroism of Bernadette Devlin has not been shown in her firebrand speeches and her endurance of terms of imprisonment, but in her having the courage to give birth to achildconceived outof marriagewhilerepresenting an Irish Catholic page 483 constituency. If she were not so plainly a warrior maiden, she might have been in danger of being tarred and feathered by her own erstwhile supporters.

Our society is negative in its view of the unmarried mother. The State gives the feeblest minimum of financial support. The mother-to-be begins to have the view of the Eskimo tribesman who abandoned his granny on the ice. No doubt he loved his helpless relative. But he had to go on living.

The larger group who desire abortions are, however, married women. Why do they want to kill foetuses? Do they just like killing? Do they enjoy being scraped with metal instruments? I don’t think that’s the answer. They want to be able to continue functioning as persons and as women. If they already have two and a half children (the number an ordinary woman can rear, and keep her sanity in an ordinary New Zealand suburb), then the addition of another child may mean a long sojourn in a mental hospital. It may mean the farming out of children to relatives or orphanages, perhaps the break-up of the marriage. It will certainly mean a postponement of the time when the housewife who is chained to her children in a social oubliette can see a glimpse of freedom ahead – the freedom that comes when she can emerge from her burrow, like a Trappist monk emerging from his cell, and work with other people and talk with them.

I am not talking through a hole in my neck, Father. Dr Fraser McDonald, the head of Kingseat Hospital and probably the best psychiatrist in the country (himself incidentally a practising Catholic) says that the women are the Negroes of our society and that they pour into his wards like troops shell-shocked in battle. These are married women. If they want abortions, it is in the hope of saving their sanity.

I would like us to be less mealy-mouthed. I would like the Church to abandon and repudiate the marriage which she contracted in the last century to the Victorian middle class. I would like to see her exercise her undoubted militant power on behalf of the subject groups, the slaves we do not call by that name. The women in our suburbs, the young in our bureaucratic schools, the poor who are fighting with guns in other countries, the Jewish citizens whom we help to drive into paranoia, the Polynesians whose culture is being annihilated, the homosexuals who walk our streets in fear, the people who are treated like guinea pigs in our mental hospitals, the people who are being daily assaulted in our jails, the men who have to go through obscene manoeuvres to keep a job.

Our militancy is misdirected. Perhaps you will say we are fighting for the foetuses. But a Church who has married herself so conspicuously and publicly to the slave-owner will not get a hearing from the slave. I am prepared to argue against abortion any day of the week. I am prepared to try to help women to keep the children they want to keep. But I am not prepared to go through the face-saving ceremony of supporting useless laws, when the net result will be that women continue to kill both themselves and their foetuses page 484 by aborting themselves with rusty bent bicycle spokes.

We rely too much on the State, Father. We have already relied too much on the State. It has led us into just about every possible blind alley in history. It is time we actually began to labour to free the slaves.

When you open your presbytery to the unmarried mothers, and let them hang their nappies on the holy statues – when you encourage nuns to join the Women’s Liberation movements – when you start a campaign to induce people to rent large houses, three families together in each and pool their financial and social resources – then I will listen to you with both ears, Father.

Till then I will take it that you have no actual interest in saving foetuses from death or their mothers from insanity.

1972 (691)