I am both an atheist and a negative-rights advocate and often mistaken for a libertarian. But I find that Victor Hugo expresses best the necessary and sufficient conditions for good government, which, incidentally, makes no mention of party: “The liberty of each citizen ends where the liberty of another citizen commences” (see Ninety-Three).
So, for me, having lived in Ireland when a story just like this one, “Irish teen wins abortion battle,” was being suppressed in the newspapers but campaigned on the streets, I can only see this one secular win as a spectacular win for the Republic of Ireland. The story I alluded to was about a very young rape victim wanting to leave the country to obtain an abortion (the government was trying to hold up the case for 10 months, and the Catholic Church worked on the victim’s father until he wanted to stop her too; see also the X Case), and it was mostly waged on corner posts and bulletin boards. The seemingly charming contradictions that make the country so vital in the arts, wit, wisdom, and philanthropy of its citizens also tend to serve the paternalists who govern their lives. It was a safe place to live and had a national health care plan serving as a safety net and yet police constantly withheld information that could have allowed the community to protect itself (e.g., “There was a man raping old women, but we didn’t tell anyone because we didn’t want to cause a panic.”), and the government censored this kind of information from the public. The only reason I caught wind of the story is that I went to UCC, where our student union was fighting for the right to disseminate pregnancy prevention and rape support information.
The paternalism at play in denying the right to travel on the basis of intent to obtain an abortion is the worst kind of violation in the eyes of a negative-rights advocate like me: it does violence to the individual body; it overruns the presumption of free will in a democratic, or at least constitutional, society; and it belies the concept of governmental protections. No government should legislate against what people can do to or with their bodies, and this government in particular took the further step of actively intervening in a citizen’s life, and has a demonstrable repeated pattern of doing so. What I see with the Catholic Church’s influence over the Republic’s government only makes it worse. We think we have a problem with the separation of church and state in the United States with religious fundamentalists holding fourth-tier law degrees flooding the Department of Justice, but try living in a state that does not make that distinction at a legal, cultural, or ethical level. Nice to see that is changing. Way to go Ireland.
Dac Nelson 