On Friday, Irish citizens will vote on whether to legalize abortion in their country. The referendum involves the possible repeal of the Irish constitution’s eighth amendment, which secures human rights to unborn children. If voters repeal the amendment, the government will consider legislation making unrestricted abortion legal for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

One of the key issues in this debate, however, does not involve abortion, but whether the Irish people view societal values to be transitory or permanent. A stream of thought believes that because every age is different than the one before, new ideals must be created, and old ideals must be discarded. In other words, as humans we are “progressing” toward a new era, shedding the old ways of the past and thereby making laws more relevant to current culture. This is the essence of so-called “progressivism.”

But does the constant establishing of new ideals and discarding past ones really form a reasonable way to approach problems? For example, does inherent human dignity change? Was lying a vice of the past but now an acceptable practice? Is equal treatment under the law an outdated concept?

These questions illuminate the concept of “permanent things.” In other words, in life there exist non-permanent things, like a 1980s Oldsmobile station wagon, and permanent things, such as the dignity of the human person and equal treatment under the law. Permanent things don’t change, even if people amend a piece of paper or pass a new law. Why? Because these things transcend the changing feelings of humanity. They stand above the transitory. They remain permanent.

Those in favor of repealing the amendment and making abortion legal in Ireland effectively believe that the dignity of the human person, though an ideal of the past, has no place in a modern society. Or that the right to end the life of your baby supersedes the right of the baby to live.

Maria Zack, chairwoman of Nations In Action, states, “No one should have the right to vote on whether a child lives or dies. It is immoral for politicians to have placed that scalpel into the hands of the Irish voters.”

And while pro-repeal advocates describe abortion as a personal choice, Irish abortions would be funded by the taxes of its citizens because the country guarantees maternity care. The repeal vote essentially asks the citizenry of Ireland whether they want to pay — collectively, not individually — for the extermination of babies.

Marcel de La Cruz notes, “The repeal side has been clamoring that it is a terrible injustice that women who wish to kill their child in the womb must travel to England, [and argues] that in fact they are owed as it were the fundamental right to be able to kill their child in Ireland.” De la Cruz illuminates the strange irony on the pro-abortion side: human rights have been replaced with the right to end another human’s life.

The UN Human Rights Committee, for example, calls the amendment and its ban on abortion “cruel, inhuman and degrading.” So these bureaucrats think that traveling to England for an abortion is cruel and degrading, but ending the life of a human being through dismemberment or chemical poisoning isn’t?

The false narrative of abortion as the “compassionate” option for women has become prevalent not only to bolster Ireland’s repeal campaign, but to increase abortion’s acceptance around the world. Abortion not only ends the life of an innocent human being — without trial or due process — but far from being compassion, it hurts the mother. Women who have abortions are more likely to struggle with substance abuse, more likely to attempt suicide, more likely to develop breast cancer, and have a higher incidence of depression and anxiety.

If a certain product caused these side-effects, it would probably be banned. However, abortion remains in our culture because the abortion industry profits off of this falsely created “right” and the lie that “liberated women choose abortion.”

The abortion “rights” movement has been a direct consequence of the “free love” and “free sex” movement of the 1960s, which denies the obvious fact that sex makes babies. Abortion advocates believe that you have a right to have sex without a baby resulting from it. Yet this position denies both nature and reality.

Additionally, the news outlet, Frontpage.org, Ireland edition, has noted that Facebook has systematically impeded or banned the publishing of several articles regarding the repeal campaign. Facebook also suspended a letter signed by over 100 legal professionals that states their pro-life position on the referendum vote. Frontpage states: “Facebook should not be in the business of banning Irish lawyers, Irish journalists and Irish news from being shared with its citizens on its platform.” Facebook claims to play fairly, but in fact manipulates and controls the news narrative by omitting divergent opinions in order to create the false appearance that “everyone in Ireland wants abortion.”

We hope the people of Ireland will stand for justice and equality of human rights — rights that by their definition should extend to the most vulnerable among us, the unborn baby. Despite the manipulation of words and rhetoric, we hope the people of Ireland will see the true, permanent things, such as human dignity, that transcend a misleading campaign.

Additional reading:

Facebook Tips Scales in Ireland’s Abortion Referendum —Wall Street Journal

A “right to abortion would force out pro-life nurses Frontpage, Ireland Edition