During last year’s abortion referendum in Ireland, debates, discussions, and interviews about abortion were aired nearly nonstop on both radio and television for the last several weeks of the campaign. I was volunteering with the Save the 8th campaign with a few of my colleagues, and watching the animated late-night brawls over abortion was one of the preferred albeit stressful activities of the pro-life activists after a long day of canvassing. But of all the TV appearances I saw, the one that struck me most powerfully was some comments made on the Tonight Show by John McGuirk, one of the spokesmen for Save the 8th.
“My reason for voting no [to abortion] changes on any given day,” he told an uncomfortable-looking panel, “but today it was that I was browsing through the UK abortion statistics for 2016 and I found that eleven babies had lethal injections into their heart in the womb and delivered dead, and the stated reason was that they had a cleft palate. 141 babies had a lethal injection into the heart and were delivered because they were twins and their parents only wanted one child, not two. One of them, last week in Australia actually, there was a story about parents who had one twin aborted because he had a heart defect, and the doctors aborted the wrong one.”
