Religion
Related: About this forumIreland was no country for young women but for men another story
Opinion piece about the women and children in those homes for unwed mothers:
Cahir O'Doherty
June 14,2014
The unwed mothers of the homes were simply not valued and neither were their children. The statistics make this plain. The death rate for illegitimate Irish children was between three and five times that of legitimate children from the 1920s through the late 1940s.
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What Ireland did with the help and instruction of the religious orders in the twentieth century was to remove love and responsibility from each man's actions, by replacing them with judgment and condemnation.
The society they created together is what were looking at now.
We know now that tens of thousands of Irishmen abandoned the women they impregnated and the child that was the result, over and over again, for most of the the 20 century.
They did this without injury to their livelihoods or reputations. They discovered they could walk between the raindrops, so they did.
But for Irish women - and their children - it was another story. They became the focus of a lifelong, religiously inspired shame that marked their lives.
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It was inevitable that the unspeakable shame that was attached to the mother would be attached to the child. We already have multiple eyewitness accounts to confirm this.
Women disappeared, children disappeared, by the tens of thousands, for decades, into those disastrous gulags. Anyone who thinks this story will soon blow over had not been paying attention.
http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/No-country-for-young-women-of-Ireland-but-for-men-another-story.html
msongs
(67,467 posts)beam me up scottie
(57,349 posts)If abortion is so "horrific" why not allow women to use birth control?
AtheistCrusader
(33,982 posts)Interfering with conception is clearly 'interfering with god's plan', but at the same time, for entirely non-gods-plan reasons, the woman is a shameful sinner for getting pregnant out of wedlock.
You know, mind-bendingly Evil horror. Keeps the pews full, I guess.
skepticscott
(13,029 posts)for all of those impoverished women. Which makes everything all better.
AtheistCrusader
(33,982 posts)" the unspeakable shame that was attached to the mother "
Hmm. I wonder, who might have come up with that and why...
beam me up scottie
(57,349 posts)Thanks.
AtheistCrusader
(33,982 posts)If you threw it in GD, it would get all the outrage and derision it deserves.
Here in this sub-forum, it'll be met with apologia and dismissal, and it'll sink.
It's a 'nature of the audience' thing. That's my prediction anyway.
beam me up scottie
(57,349 posts)Opinion: Why Irish delusions of being the best gives the worst result
Fintan O'Toole
Tue, Jun 17, 2014
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Its easy to understand why Catholic Ireland became so hyper-virtuous. A long history of denigration, humiliation and subjection creates a profound distortion. It is not enough to be as good as anybody else you have to be better, indeed the best: uniquely wonderful. But this fantasy is not harmless. At best, it feeds a deluded detachment from reality. At worst, you have to hide, exclude, deny, those who threaten to spoil the picture of perfection.
Unlike the extreme versions of such dark utopias in Nazi Germany or Stalins Soviet Union, independent Ireland did not actually exterminate the spoilers of its unique purity. But it did get rid of them mostly through emigration but also, notoriously, in its vast system of coercive confinement: industrial schools, Magdalene laundries, mother and baby homes and mental hospitals.
Impure women
Thus, the appalling treatment of impure women in these institutions was a direct consequence of the insistence that Irish femininity was uniquely pure. This was a key point of national difference: England seethed with sex and sin, Ireland was a paradise of continence and virginity.
This unique virtue in turn compensated for the real economic failures of the new State what did it matter that we were poor, backward and exporting half our population? Our values were not material but spiritual. And, as Eamon de Valera openly claimed, this unmatched holiness would do nothing less than save the world: Ireland today has no dearer hope than this: that, true to her own holiest traditions, she may humbly serve the truth and help by truth to save the world.
This fantasy may have been risible, but for those who had to be locked away to keep it alive it was no laughing matter.
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/ireland-s-portrayal-of-itself-as-the-purest-holiest-or-richest-country-has-brought-us-lies-and-exclusion-1.1834382