We need your help now
Support from readers like you keeps The Journal open.
You are visiting us because we have something you value. Independent, unbiased news that tells the truth. Advertising revenue goes some way to support our mission, but this year it has not been enough.
If you've seen value in our reporting, please contribute what you can, so we can continue to produce accurate and meaningful journalism. For everyone who needs it.
Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
By continuing, you are indicating that you accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
EVEN DONALD TRUMP’S most ardent supporters would be at pains to describe his career swap as a seamless one.
After all, while this month’s victory saw him become the sixth US President to attain the role as their first public office, that number tells only half the story. Of those who preceded him on that score, three had esteemed military résumés, and the other two were long-time cabinet secretaries.
Trump’s fortune can’t buy that kind of experience
And yet, rather than a hill to die on, it was upon that very inexperience that the 70-year-old built his church. Unsullied by the careerism of party politics, his followers have lauded his aptitude to speak freely without fear of reproach.
Unfiltered frankness is undoubtedly an admirable character trait, but the fact that it could just as easily be boasted by a puckish toddler is hardly a ringing endorsement of one’s presidential credentials.
Then again, it would be remiss to suggest that Trump’s was the first campaign to target heart over head.
Cults of personality
One need look no further than the tidal wave which swept Barack Obama into office for confirmation of that. But whereas Obama’s candidacy may have appeared at least superficially populist, it was built on unwavering ideals.
Like Kennedy and Reagan before him, he used charisma to cause change. Publicity was a means to an end.
For Donald Trump, publicity is the end
His success has centered on one emptily bombastic soundbite after another, his bumper-sticker policies catering tragically well to the Snapchat attention span of modern media.
Trump’s very lack of conservatism belied his status as this year’s Republican candidate, with even his own party balking at his liberal positions on matters such as gun control. And yet, if concerns about the President-elect can best be boiled down to fear of the unknown, those swirling around his closest ally amount to quite the opposite.
Mike Pence is the GOP’s answer to Ronseal, after all, his steadfastness a tangible yin to Trump’s yang. If nothing else, that courage of conviction promises to keep Trump’s increasingly erratic train on the track, but at what cost?
Pence is none the richer
On the face of it, Pence’s primitive views concerning climate change and same-sex marriage appear to tally more readily with the Westboro Baptist Church than much of the US electorate. Given the current climate on this side of the Atlantic, however, it’s his regressive stance on abortion which will likely have caught the Irish eye.
Pence has been among the brashest opponents to America’s regulation of the issue, after all, dubbing the Roe vs Wade ruling “the Supreme Court’s worst since Dred Scott.” During his time as Governor of Indiana, he endeavoured to redress that perceived imbalance, invoking some of America’s most restrictive counter-legislation.
Just 7% of Indiana counties have been left with direct access to an abortion clinic following his tenure in the Midwest, compared to a rate of 95% in states such as California.
‘I’m pro-life’
Logistics surrounding the medical procedure itself were also stymied under his watch. Pence became the first governor to place a blanket-ban on abortions which cited a foetus’ race, sex or disability.
“I’m pro-life and don’t apologise for it,” affirmed the would-be VP on the campaign trail. “I signed that legislation with a prayer that God would continue to bless these precious children, mothers and families. In time, we’ll see Roe v Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs.”
That Pence’s pro-life politicking is rooted in his Christianity is hardly a foreign concept to those with an Irish sensibility. A simple Google search of my own namesake should serve as proof enough of that that.
Yesterday’s men decide women’s futures
Disconcerting though it may be, the narrative of 2016 remains heavily shaped by tenets from a bygone age and the rights of tomorrow’s women continue to be abridged by the whims of yesterday’s men.
Even in a society where a White House without a Y chromosome remains elusive, calls for women to be the protagonists in the discourse surrounding their own human rights hardly seem unreasonable.
America’s decision to plump for a Pence-Trump ticket has gone some way to ensuring those calls fall on deaf ears for some time yet. It is incumbent on the rest of the world to shout a little louder.
Ronan Mullen has a Masters in Journalism. He is currently working as a freelance writer.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Sorry WHICH Ronan Mullen is this?
The Ronan Mullen who believes that men are no longer men after a certain age
@Aaron D:
The Imposter.
What relevance does Mike Pence have to the abortion debate in Ireland?
He’s a white man, and we all know how evil they are
Oh the Feminoids will love you… :)
No relevance whatsoever but it’s a good excuse for clickbait. Expect an article on the Catholic church next, something on the pope, public service unions and finally a few Trump items.
@Cen Sored: where did the author make any reference to Mike Pence’s ethnicity or skin colour?
It was implied with all the subtlety of the journal’s last article on Trump, and how they think he is the same as Hitler. https://www.google.ie/amp/www.thejournal.ie/1930s-nostalgia-trump-hitler-3100144-Nov2016/%3Famp%3D1
“Masters in Journalism” – while churning out the same same media drivel – men are evil (especially the white ones) , abortion is healthcare? Jesus wept
@John Byrne: Abortion IS healthcare. If a woman has a miscarriage does she not need medical attention too? Goodness me.
@Veronica: So, by your, er, logic, if a woman has a miscarriage she needs an abortion for healthcare? Duh? Don’t you mean she needs healthcare after an abortion, be it natural (miscarriage) or homicide-for-convenience? So she doesn’t say crash and bleed out in a taxi as one misfortunate poor Irish lady did not long ago after visiting a UK abortuary? Of course most barely will have heard of that so quickly did the Irish meeja (at least the abortion-promoting mediums like the Irish Times) bury the story while continuing to wail and weep crocodile tears and light cheesy candles over Savita Halavapannar and her tragic loss to…not a lack of abortion…but galloping sepsis and septicaemia, the only cause of maternal morbidity which continues to rise, in the UK, where abortion is legal and where thus according to the ”logic” of the pro-homicide side: sepsis and septicaemia related deaths should be unknown.
@John O’Driscoll: That woman who died in the back of a taxi had looked for an abortion in Ireland ,but was refused .She & her partner then had to save for a couple of extra weeks to go to the UK,to procure that abortion..That story was in the Irish meeja-did you not look ?
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/minister-shocked-at-death-of-woman-after-uk-abortion-1.1470902
They even covered the case too
Francis McCarthy, there was much talk of “life-saving abortions” (which has to take the prize for the oxymoron of the century) from the crocodile tears shedding and candle waving useful idiots of Planned Parenthood as I recall. This tragic case was a wake up call, being a death causing abortion as I’ve always seen them to be. The rest of your links and thesis are red herrings. Woman had an abortion, legally carried out, and died, along, obviously, with her baby. Where that happened is immaterial to the case.
That is all we know and that is all we need to know. But keep on campaigning for Planned Parenthood’s greasy earns. They’re as much a part of the Rough Beast, the Iron Triangle, the military-industrial-political Death Industry, as any military contractor or illegal war mongering US President or Useful Idiot UK Prime Minister.
@John O’Driscoll: John everyone had heard of that case, not just because the media did in fact cover it as Francis already has shown but because you and the rest of the force birthers have been using it since it happened as some kind of scare mongering tactic along with the paranoid ramblings of a media cover up about it despite it being shown time and time again that it was in fact reported on. no one is campaigning for “greasy earns” , they are campaigning for the right for women to chose whether they remain pregnant or not and should they chose not to, to have their abortion in this country.
@Dell: I recall that case very well. It barely merited two articles, buried in the middle of the Irish Times, which of course has had its own agenda to peddle led by the creative Kitty Holland, who led the charge to appropriate Savita Halavapannar and her baby’s tragic deaths from sepsis and septicaemia and more importantly medical incompetence of the most abject order (”WOMAN, DENIED ABORTION, DIES IN GALWAY HOSPITAL” – a more mendacious and scurrilous headline I’ve yet to see in the Irish Times). Sepsis and septicaemia, the biggest killer of mothers-to-be in the UK, where abortion is legal, was made the subject of acres of hysterical newsprint disingenuously linking it to the law on medical abortion in this State. Medical abortion, when it killed a woman as well as her child, legal medical abortion in the UK, barely merited a paragraph or two next to the small ads. By their works we know them.
I thought the PC thing now was not to be gender specific. Feminists are so behind the times.
You are aware that gender and sex aren’t the same thing, aren’t you?
Go and have some gender.
Top marks
Gender and sex are identical and there’s only 2. Any other opionion in this is just liberal psudeo science and delusion
Untrue and disproven by nature itself which manifests variations of gender mixes including hermaphrodites, asexuals, bisexuals, transgenders, cross-dressers, etc., etc., etc.
@Cummin, Gender and sex are not the same and no there arn’t only 2 sexes. “Humans, as well as some other organisms, can have a chromosomal arrangement that is contrary to their phenotypic sex; for example, XX males or XY females (see androgen insensitivity syndrome). Additionally, an abnormal number of sex chromosomes (aneuploidy) may be present, such as Turner’s syndrome, in which a single X chromosome is present, and Klinefelter’s syndrome, in which two X chromosomes and a Y chromosome are present, XYY syndrome and XXYY syndrome.[2] Other less common chromosomal arrangements include: triple X syndrome, 48, XXXX, and 49, XXXXX” I think you should leave the hard thinking to the proffessionals!
More hysterical shite. Get a grip of yourself, man up Ronan.
That’s it. Keep on pumping out the men vs women nonsense to please your feminist peers
If the authors name is Ronan and not Ronán then I have never seen a more convincing case for the use of a nom de plume…
Oh look!! ANOTHER pro abortion article by the journal.
I’m in favour for Abortion(If raped or in cause of danger to the women if giving birth) and the rights of women to do what they want went their body but this “look at the evil white man over there” won’t do any favour for their cause.
Evil Hillary’s bloodlust for late term partial birth abortions may have lost her the election, she argued this point with him in Debate 3 – it can never be justified , its barbaric.
I would consider voting in favour of some limited form of termination in first trimester after consultation with doctor to make sure there was no coercion and to explain the downsides – depression, trauma that may follow – its not all sunshine and flowers that the abortion on demand backers would have you believe.
However what we are witnessing right now is a heave to bring abortion on demand to Ireland – not for FFA/Incest/rape which we heard ramblings of in the Dail, these guys want it no holds barred.
When you see sinister George Soros getting involved you know whats on the table and whats planned, we must fight this barage and onslaught by elites and a complicit media to bring their barbarity to our shores.
We should support expectant parents and make it easier for them to have children who will be the next generation of Irish – we shouldn’t make it easier and more convenient to get rid of them.
Abortion is tragic – mothers and fathers mourn, it isn’t healthcare as much as the narrative of the pro aborts will tell you – its a termination of life
@John Byrne: Explain to me what a “partial birth abortion” is ? Thanks in advance .
@Francis Mc Carthy:
The feet, body of the baby are born whilst the head remains inside the mother. The abortionist then uses an instrument to cut into the back of the baby’s neck which results in death of the baby. Short answer.
@Bernadette OConnor: ffs untrue
@Veronica:
Get the facts!
@Bernadette OConnor: In China, until the Wharton’s Jelly collapses or the umbilicus is cut, whereupon the neo-nate is immediately conferred with all the rights and responsibilities of Chinese citizenship (if Chinese by blood), abortion may be performed at any stage, including fully born.
The preferred method is an hypodermic full of formaldehyde rammed through the fontanelle and injected directly into the brain to burn it away.
Coming soon to a ”gratest little c untry in dee wurld” near you perhaps if the crocodile tear shedding and candle waving hypocrites who hi-jacked the tragic death of a mother and baby in a Galway hospital from galloping sepsis and septicaemia and medical incompetence in dealing with same, succeed in their disingenuous campaign to smuggle homicide-for-convenience into Ireland inside their funerary urns.
@Bernadette OConnor: This is why no one likes the pro life. If abortion so so bad then why do you need to make up lies and exaggerated versions of it for shock value??
@Rob Cahill: It’s because the likes of Bernadette and John O’Driscoll believe scare mongering bullsh*t sites more than any facts, if they were capable of looking up facts in the first place
@Larissa Caroline Nikolaus: \Not a word that I’ve said is other than true and verifiable. I lived in China 6 years and worked there on and off near 12. Know their systems well.
When are us men going to stop telling women what to do……..referendum now and stop the shinanigans by cowardly politians….. invertebrates most of them.
Do you know I told the ex-girlfriend as I told her to go get an abortion… it was her right..!!!
@Stephen Duffy:I’m doubting even pro lifers are as dumb as that but you know full well they are not mandatory. No need to exaggerate your ignorance at all.
There actually is a point there is you care to think about it, except the guys at Uni would refer to sending them for a “scrape”.. oh the guys were great believers of women’s right.. their body; their choice; “but whatever you choose huni, keep me out of it….!! because I’ve a choice and I am exercising it”…
@Stephen Duffy: Red thumbing yourself.. FFS get a life
Yawn ….!!!!!
@Stephen Duffy: GRow up
That’s a bit rich coming from you….
It’s time for family planning clinics in Ireland to start providing abortion services.
The international scandal about Ireland’s abuse of women’s human rights is clearly needed.
The 8th amendment needs to be abolished and must be ignored until that happens.
What your argument is really about is nothing more than fumbling in a greasy sluice and adding the half-pence to the pence as ever. Ka-Ching for the Planned Parenthood Death Industry.
While it might be a nice catchphrase, it wasn’t yesterday’s men in America that were instrumental in the election of Trump, it was today’s women in that country. Or so all of the post election analysis would have us believe.
Yeah I see them trying to overturn abortion there which epuld be a sad day. At least when we do vote to allow it, it’s permanent.
Why so? We had a referendum about abortion in 1983 and three more since then. Why not have one every 10 years so that the stance of the country reflects the mood of the people at the time?
As kids grow up to realise that their brothers and sisters had been killed by their mums for the sake of convenience they might well reject abortion in another referendum.
We thought an abortion ban would be permanent when it was approved by a 67% majority in 1983, who knew the lefties and the MSM would conspire to undermine it for the 33 years since?
@Brian Lenehan: What if those kids wouldn’t have been around if mum never had that “abortion?”
Wow!
@Brian Lenehan: What about the kids growing up without Mothers because they didn’t have access to a procedure that might have saved their life?
@Francis Mc Carthy: what if the kids that could have resulted if you hadn’t had that last wank ? What if? What if? What if? Puerile.
@Rob Cahill: According to you mothers are irrelevant!
@Maria Mhic Mheanmain: Exactly where did you pick that up?? Or can you lot just not help yourselves lying?
@Rob Cahill: You have a very short memory Rob. But you did say it!
@Maria Mhic Mheanmain: You are downright lyinh here which is to be expected, I would never even think a mother was irrelevant let alone say it on a news website. Lucky for me everyone knows all about you here so I won’t worry about my reputation too much.
@Rob Cahill: No I am not. However the question is whether you are lying, or whether you have just forgotten. Either way, you did say it.
@Maria Mhic Mheanmain: I think you might be mixing me up with someone else.. Either that or you are sop used to lying you can’t help it anymore.. Either way, No one cares what you have to say.
@Rob Cahill: No I am not Mixing you op with anyone else, You said mothers were irrelevant.
@Maria Mhic Mheanmain: Please stop lying.. Or back up your allegation with proof. Not that you lot seem to think you need any for the bs you spout.
On the other hand it could be argued that those without a Y chromosome are seeking to arrogate to their gender exclusively the power of life and death over both genders with and without a Y chromosome at the earliest and most vulnerable stage of their human lives.
No need to be religious to see there’s something wrong with that, and with any system that allows by law for privatized for-profits to reap vast lucre from the abortuaries they own; peddling homicide-for-convenience and trampling on the UN Right To Life that is not distinguished in UN law anyway between those who can suck air unaided and those who temporarily need the load of another’s respiratory system to collect their oxygen.
@John O’Driscoll: so pregnancy is merely someone temporarilly loaning there respiratory system… Easy told you have never been pregnant and never will be. the repercussions of a pregnancy on a womans body and life are nowhere near as trivial as you seem to think they are but more importantly it isn’t your body or respiratory system so really none of your business and under no circumstance should you have a say over it or whether a woman should be forced to loan them out to a foetus.
@John O’Driscoll: also there are loads of born babies and adults who need organs, how about we force you to loan yours out? and before you use the, that would involve an operation etc, argument, so does a cesscarian and a lot of women end up having to have those so the foetus that has been borrowing their respiratory system can be delivered.
Dell, I was not diminishing pregnancy, not at all, rather it is you and your likes who trivialise pregnancy, treating it as something to be terminated for convenience along with the human life and lives assaulted in the process.
As for organ donation am a lifelong donor card carrier. Anyone is welcome to whatever’s left that’s useful in my corpse once I’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, and if one of my loved ones needs one of my organs provided there’d be built in redundancy allowing me to continue upside the daisies for the remainder of the old three score and ten they’d be welcome to my kidney or a lung or whatever. I even believe organ donation should be automatic, with an opt out for those who wish the worm or the fire to not have their fuel diminished in the grave or the crematorium.
The hypocrisies of the pro-homicide side when they try to make false comparisons between men and women in this, while arguing that women have a sui generis “right” to arrogate to themselves the power of life and death for both genders at the most vulnerable time of life is no longer breathtaking so much as enervating in the extreme. Being pregnant is something I cannot conceive, but I am also a father, a human, and in that I am as much a parent and a human as any mother. And as human as any child born or unborn, and the trashing of the latter’s right to life for the sake of some other human’s convenience and the profit of many more, is something up with which I will not silently put.
@John O’Driscoll: I am not talking about you loaning them out after you die or even to loved ones while you live.. I’m talking about you giving them to complete strangers you have never met. You shouldn’t have a problem with that as you seem to have no problem loaning out my organs to a foetus, or any other woman’s for that matter.
As for some other humans convenience… until you actually know what it is to be pregnant and don’t have a choice about it, you really have no idea what you are talking about. Also we are not pro homicide as no one is being murdered, only in your force birthers little mind is that happening. What a woman choses to do about her pregnancy has sod all to do with you and you can be silent or loud about what you perceive to be homicide but, it still won’t change the fact that it is not in fact homicide.
As for you being a father and so on.. I’m a mother and I want my daughter to have the right to full body autonomy and not to have what goes on in her womb dictated to by the likes of you.
@Dell: reply I made to your last there censored don’t know why. Homicide is the killing of a person. That’s it. It can be legal or illegal depending on the circumstances. In the context of born victims, that is either murder or manslaughter or justifiable homicide i.e. self-defence. In the context of unborn victims, it is either homicide for convenience or homicide for self-defence, in the latter instance if it arises as a result of actions taken to save the life of the mother from clear and present objective threat. Check it out in the dictionary.
I believe fathers have a right to be concerned for the safety and well-being of their children, and men in general have a right to be concerned for the safety and well-being of society’s children. They after all and other things being equal are what we expect to sustain us in our old age both on a social and personal level. But that would imply all men who oppose medical abortions for convenience are only thinking of their own, in their senescence. Not so. A coarsening and callousing of society at any level is something that should be opposed by all, regardless of s/ex and gender. ‘A country is not just what it does, it is what it tolerates.” That’s written as I’ve seen it on the walls of Yad Vashem.
If only his god was powerful enough to answer his prayer.
They have a 2nd amendment to the constitution in the great land of the free non? Others and especially those ivory tower dwellers in power telling and forcing you what you can and can’t do with your own body amounts to tyranny. So give them another hole to breath through. Can’t imagine the incoming ivory tower dwellers would have any issues with this as they had their mouths full of freedoms and constitutional rights in the last few months.
Abortion: ‘Rights of tomorrow’s children continue to be abridged by yesterday’s women’
The irony! The rights of “tomorrows women” are being attacked by abortion campaigners, attacking, as they are their very right to life in the first few months of their existence.
Ràimèas.
Where’s the fella that only comments “more bollox”. We need him now.
Do pro abortion ones forget that the unborn child is a child that will grow into a life, that it is alive and a human being that has a biological father as abortion effects 3 people in total?
So much men commenting on womens bodies. Oh my, the irony. Thats what we need, more men thinking the world needs their opinion
@Eimear Post Ginger: It’s not the women’s bodies are our concern, we men, but our children’s presently in danger of being from their mother’s wombs untimely ripp’d, and ripped apart.
Have to laugh at proaborts going awol over a pro-life man placed in a position of power then play the gender game yet fail to address the male dominated judicial panel that legislates for abortion across every country including the US and Ireland
have your say