Mental Health

OPINION:

Body Shame

If you are going through a bereavement, one of the most agonising things you can hear is that the death was “God’s will”. It kind of makes you hate God, for why would God need to take a person you love, particularly someone in the prime of their lives? I think back to how horrific it was for my family, most especially my brother and sister-in-law, to lose a child at eight and a half months and deliver her stillborn. But God’s will is a powerful weapon used to shut down questions, grief, concerns, and hopes. God’s will has been used to justify misogyny, racism, slavery, holocausts and homophobia.

With referendum posters pushing affecting and demanding slogans and images in our faces, I can’t help wondering what lies beneath such inflamed emotionality. A core religious belief around conception is that God alone can give life; it is his gift. Hence the anxiety around any scientific encroachments or interventions that might decide or influence potential for life, be it IVF, surrogacy, cloning, stem cells; or the removal of the potential for life – be it through contraception or terminations. Within this domain of God’s, sex is only for procreation, never for fun or pleasure.

Accordingly, behind much of the worst opposition to the marriage equality referendum was a particular extreme Catholic think-tank anxiety of there potentially being written into the Irish Constitution a legal recognition that marriages are not grounded on ‘making babies’, but on something else, something more – that the highest law of the land might allow sex to be an act enjoyed for its own sake. This was a glorious revolution for our Irish bodies.

There are very agonising, debilitating consequences to conception being positioned as God’s gift or God’s will. It sets up elites, ‘God’s chosen’, those God favours more, or exclusively with the gift of life. For the person struggling to have a child, how loving is it to hear that they are just not chosen by God to be a parent?

But such is the burden of shame and guilt carried by people struggling with fertility. There are always implications that they, most especially women, were too selfish, left it too late, dared have a career, didn’t do God’s will. There is such a simple line too easily drawn that all medical difficulties, illnesses, cancers are God’s will, and therefore potential punishments.

Considering God’s will and ‘gift’ in conception, I understand why the No campaign struggle with, indeed sidestep, the issue of a woman becoming pregnant through rape. How could God ‘gift’ life in the most violent assault possible on a human? Or again in the case of foetal abnormalities, how could God be so cruel as to give life only to take it away, with such emotional and physical pain to the parents? These things are meant to test us, we are told, but what a cruel, unnecessary, gratuitous test.

Like many people, I recognise that abortion is a termination of something living, whether that be termed cells, embryo or baby, and hence why some choose to label abortion ‘murder’. But I also know that too many pregnancies in unwanted, non-consensual, and unplanned situations can equally bring a very real loss of life, in tragedies of suicide. The questions of a termination of a pregnancy are so much more complex and awful than right and wrong. This is an impossible choice for the mother or parents to confront; it always will be.

Most voters considering ‘Yes’ aren’t advocating murder, death or baby killing, but that an individual, or couple, have the right to choose, to make this impossible choice, with support, knowledge, information, and options from caring, understanding, apprised professionals.

This whole referendum process, whether people like it or not, is in of itself pro-choice because it is asking us, the democratic population, to choose. Elections and referenda enshrine the experience, the import and the necessity of allowing people choice, and trusting them to choose what is right for them. For me, more important than Yes or No is that everyone exercises their right to choose and vote on May 25. It is this right to choose that we are honouring, living and sharing on that day, whatever the outcome.

“ With referendum posters pushing a! ecting and demanding slogans and images in our faces, I can’t help wondering what lies beneath such inl amed emotionality.

And just as this referendum process democratically trusts and enshrines our right to choose yes or no, so do I believe that people, women, have the right to choose. As a psychoanalyst, I cannot make people’s choices for them, nor do I oppose their choices, even when I think or believe their choice is wrong. The freedom to choose is the most fundamental human right.

I don’t believe in an interventionist God, because the core gift we, the privileged humans, have been given is the right to choose our lives, conscience, futures. Choice is a privilege and a burden; we are condemned to be free. If the true measure of a person lies in the choices we make, we must be able to choose in order to be truly human. Wasn’t this truly God’s gift?

Ray is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist specialising in i ndividual and relationship counselling. He can be contacted on 086 828 0033