belgianwaffle

Wading into deep waters


Posted in: Reading etc.

I reread “Praxis” by Fay Weldon recently. I didn’t realise I was rereading until I got to nearly the end and it came flooding back. I read a lot of Fay Weldon in my 20s and was inspired by the injustices she identified. But this time I found it dated. I feel that the battles have moved on. No one in the Western world would seriously suggest to a college student that she would be better off dropping out of college and getting married. Plenty of people, however, would suggest to a college educated woman that she would be better off dropping out of the workforce and staying home minding her children. I suppose that this is progress.

Then the latest Mavis Cheek is also about 70s feminists and consciousness raising and I’m tired of having my consciousness raised in this particular way. Maybe I need some new books.

If you haven’t read Praxis, let me ruin it for you. Praxis is jailed for suffocating a new baby with Down’s syndrome. Her (let us say, so that I can spare you the tortuous details of the plot) daughter refuses to have the relevant tests and this child is born very badly handicapped and with, Praxis believes, every prospect of blighting the daughter’s life, so Praxis takes matters into her own hands and suffocates the new born baby. Is this worse than having an abortion at four months? The geepeemama has this to say about abortion and down’s syndrome:

“It brings back what is probably my most poignant memory to date – the time when, as a junior obstetrician, I had to take away the 22-week-old baby with Down’s after a medical termination. After I’d fished him out of the bedpan (parents refusing to look) I held him in the sluice and cried and cried and told him “I would have had you”.

Does aborting foetuses with disabilities say something about our attitude to people with disabilities?

I see that the British are approaching the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act with 200,000 terminations a year, 6,000 of them from Ireland.  I am from a country that has no legislation on abortion. Following much tortuous discussion and angry debate, no political party has had the nerve to produce anything like legislation. There is a constitutional protection to the right to life. The pro-life groups who were many and vociferous insisted that this was not sufficient to prevent abortion in Ireland. In retrospect this was foolish of them. In 1983 the Constitution was amended to acknowledge the right to life of the unborn, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother. And there the matter rested to the chagrin of the, then smallish, pro-choice lobby and to the delight of the pro-lifers. Then, there was a particularly unpleasant case. A young girl was raped by a family friend and she became pregnant. Her parents notified the police. Because of the constitutional right to life of the unborn child, there was a doubt as to whether this girl could travel to England for an abortion (a very common Irish solution to an Irish problem). There followed a court case which convulsed the nation and, in due course, in 1992, the constitution was amended to provide that the right to life of the unborn would not limit freedom to travel between Ireland and another state and nor would it limit freedom to obtain or make available information relating to services lawfully available in another state. That is our entire legislative provision. It would appear that the 1983 amendment gives the right to an abortion when the life of the mother is at risk, including, where she threatens suicide. Even, in these extreme conditions, our politicians have been reluctant to put a toe in these particularly stormy waters (if I may mix my metaphors): abortion is not available in Ireland and we continue to export this problem abroad, largely to godless England. The problem has resurfaced recently in the Miss D case. As one commentator pointed out, we have a whole alphabet to cover the abortion issue.

I live in a country which allows abortion. I know this because the then, very catholic, king abdicated for a day for the law to go through. They have a very robust attitude to abortion in Belgium – if something is wrong, have an abortion and try again. Who am I to condemn other people’s choices in heartbreaking situations? But yet, the older I get, the more I worry about abortion.

Would I want to force anyone to stay pregnant? No, I don’t think so. When I see a 24 week old baby surviving, clinging on to life, do I believe that terminations at 24 weeks are a problem? I think I’m beginning to. Where do you draw the line? Is every sperm sacred? Is the morning after pill alright? Is eight weeks fine? Oh to enjoy the certainty of the pro-life movement. No matter how extreme the case, whatever the crime, whatever the health of the foetus, whatever the age of the mother, even the morning after pill is absolutely forbidden. Or indeed the certainty of the pro-choice movement. I just don’t know what’s right. Trumping the rights of a bunch of cells over those of a vulnerable abused teenager must be wrong. Musn’t it? When do cells become a baby? Is viability a valid cut off point? They say hard cases make bad law, do they make bad morals also?

Discipline


Posted in: Princess

Princess: I don’t like C.  I don’t want her to collect me from school any more.

Me: Why not?

Her: I want someone who obeys me all the time.

Dealing with a closed mind


Posted in: Princess

Her:  I want the pink toothpaste.

Me: It tastes exactly the same as the blue toothpaste.

Her: Pink is for girls.

Me: No, it’s not, that’s just social conditioning.

Her: What’s social conditioning?

Me: Well, people say that pink is for girls and blue is for boys but it’s not true.  You just feel it’s true because you see lots of pink things for little girls and you hear it a lot.

Her: I don’t care; I like pink.

Three generations of annoyingly precocious children


Posted in: Family, Princess

The Princess irritates her teacher by answering before other children (as well she might, since they have to struggle with limited French in a way that she does not). I well remember when I was in fourth class (10) annoying my teacher by lecturing her on Samuel Johnson (who wouldn’t be annoyed?). I got a letter from my father the other day (letters from my father are always a thrill and it remains a matter of deep irritation that my sister gets more of them than I do – she points out that she writes more too) recounting something similar happening to him when he was young in the 1930s:

“I recalled when I was in St. Joseph’s (a fairly tough National school which drew a lot of its clientele from the Marsh – that is, from the flat of the city, places like Sheare’s street, Liberty street, the Main street, and so on). This area had mostly been depopulated by giving the people better housing in the suburbs – Ballyphehane, Gurranebraher, and so on, so that you would not be able to form a very good idea of the way it was when I was a child.

I was a goody-two-shoes sitting in the front of the class, when the Presentation brother in charge, a brother Alphonsus, set the class a problem in mathematics. I was then a precocious little b*st*rd who had also (like you) learned to read very early, and I tended to be a teacher’s pet, I think. At all events, I solved the problem easily and quickly (I am not so sure I could do it now) and called out the answer within a very short time.

At that time each teacher had a cane – a stick about a metre long and 1 or 2 centimetres thick – and the good brother called me to the front of the class, and gave me a good blow of the cane on my outstretched hand. This was then roughly the equivalent of what you told me about M. The zeitgeist today would find this sort of discipline offensive, but it was the norm then, although I think the brother over-reacted: he might have been hoping for a few minutes relaxation while the class struggled with the problem. This sort of discipline even had a theoretical pedagological justification. The unruly student was beaten, and when suffering the pain of the punishment he would be more amenable to words of advice and reproof about his behaviour. I am not necessarily defending this, but I didn’t offend in this way again”.

Quite.

Hideous, hideous, hideous


Posted in: Family

Yesterday we decided to take the children to mini-Europe because that’s the kind of thing you end up doing when you have children. Don’t sneer.

We didn’t set out until 4.15 because Michael woke up late from his nap and the Princess didn’t want to go and we had to pack snacks and things were against us. The traffic was brutal and we limped across town very slowly, navigating our way to this distant location. Daniel and Michael kept demanding food and then chucking it into the boot and dropping things on the floor and screaming until they were retrieved. The Princess was too warm and had to take off her coat and couldn’t. We got lost. We had a higher proportion of squealing to a halt and irate parents leaning into the back seat than is usually a feature of our lives.

We finally arrived about 4.45. Last admissions were at 5. There was some kind of book fair on. There was no parking. We found parking. Admission was only via a number of flights of steps or a long detour (an ideal feature for an attraction seeking to entice small children). The clock was ticking. We took the steps. We harried the boys and herself up. We arrived at 5.05 to find, inevitably, that the bloody thing had closed.

We spent some time at the Europe Village which was utterly hideous and boasted a number of fast food outlets, a big yoke with slides and ropes and a merry-go-round. They all had a go on the merry-go-round. Daniel was scared. Mr. Waffle took Daniel off. The Princess instantly wanted to go to the toilet. I took her into the Quick with a screaming Michael protesting vigourously. We went back to the play area. The Princess went into meltdown, screaming hysterically because I would not let her blow up a balloon she found on the ground. Daniel got hit on the head by a bigger child swinging on a pole. Michael stuck his tongue out at a larger child with a bicycle, the combatants were separated with injury to dignity only.

We went home, back up the steps, everyone howling, Princess demanding to be carried, boys risking death throwing themselves down the flights of concrete steps, hauling the buggy behind us. Everyone into the car; drove home (another 45 minutes) with everyone wailing to various degrees. Made dinner. Boys wouldn’t touch it. Put them to bed in a sulk (everyone).

How was your Saturday?

Incidentally, this afternoon, we all went for a walk in the woods and it was fabulous.  The Princess hunted mushrooms, the boys played with their footballs, the weather was wonderful and they all ate their dinner when we got home.  Lovely, lovely, lovely.