Did you hear the one about the Irish Bishops and the embryos?

FOLLOW LAUGHTER. THAT'S the best I can do in response to the plea from the Roman Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Diarmuid Martin, that there should be a national debate on the subject of embryos.

You'll have noticed, unless you've been living on the beach, that a former couple has turned to the courts to decide the fate of the embryos they had frozen when, as loving partners, they underwent fertility treatment.

They've already had a child from that treatment and now the former wife wants the embryos implanted in herself in the hope of having another. To that end her lawyers argue that the embryos may not be destroyed because they are the unborn who our constitution is supposed to protect. The husband's lawyers argue that an embryo is not an unborn until it could be born, i.e., until it is implanted in the womb; that outside the womb it can't turn into a baby, and that therefore the embryos can be destroyed. Notice the position of the husband, by the way. For reasons that seem to him compelling he does not want a child of his to be borne by this woman. He wants to prevent the development of the viable, independent life of such a child. That's exactly the position of women who seek abortions: they have reasons which seem to them good not to proceed with a pregnancy. Who would have foreseen that the questions raised by abortion would become unisex--that the subject might be somewhat freed of the element of fundamental contempt for women and disgust at their bodies?

Archbishop Martin didn't live here during the so-called debates about the unborn of the early 1980s and 1990s. He was in Rome. It is usually represented as a good thing that he came back to the local ecclesiastical scene with clean hands, though of course it doesn't say much for the local ecclesiastical scene. But by publicly calling for a debate on human life--that is, a debate on abortion--he reveals himself as something of a stranger.

There are hugely important questions to be debated. Professor Ronald Dworkin, for instance, long ago published thoughts on the law and its possible responses to the different trimesters of pregnancy which have never been discussed in Ireland because the antiabortion people insist that thinking about abortion is a step toward abortion. We're not to think. An Italian expert in the present case told the court that in her country there are no frozen embryos any more because the approach to fertilization differs from the practice here. We're not to hear about comparative technologies either, it seems, because comparison might weaken an absolutist position.

But nobody could possibly want to debate again with representatives of the Irish Roman Catholic church; by definition, a debater is on the other side. No veteran of the other side could hope for respect for women's experience and women's moral capacities. Even though there might not again be a grotesquerie like The Late Late Show where (to the eternal disgrace of RTE--Radio Telefis Eireann, Ireland's state-financed public broadcaster) "Father" Michael Cleary was allowed to present a collection of gravely disabled people to illustrate his point that if the unborn were not protected by the constitution women would choose not to have disabled babies and the wheelchair users surrounding him in the television studio would have been murdered in the womb. It is not beside the point that Michael Cleary was an hysteric and a hypocrite who did his best to destroy the woman he installed, when she was very young, as his concubine--as was well known to many of his priest colleagues. What matters more is the profound disrespect of the complex and morally exacting experience of bearing and rearing a disabled child, and the denial of the selfless love and care offered to such children all over the world and throughout history by people in general but above all by mothers.

I still flinch when I think of the variation offered on Cleary's characterization of the word women by a perfectly sane cleric, Bishop Joseph Cassidy. I heard him say solemnly, on an authoritative radio program shortly before the voting, that the most dangerous place for a child to be in the world today is in its mother's womb. I know, and everyone knows, that their mothers have been the protectors of children, always and everywhere, against war and famine and indifference and neglect. Fathers are very often protectors too, of course, but the central, overwhelming fact is that the children of the planet are brought through childhood by the women of the planet. To ignore this fact for the sake of a debating point was and is astonishingly hurtful.

What does such a skewing of the record of women bespeak but enmity--an enmity all the more lively for being unconscious?

I'd be very interested in knowing what has changed. What part of the abortion question does Archbishop Martin think is now open to debate? That is, if he meant debate.

But I think he meant what he also plainly said: That he wants influence. He wants his church's views in there influencing whatever policy emerges from the court's deliberations in the embryo case. Well, he's entitled to that and there's not the slightest doubt he'll get it. But is there any hope he can get it just in simple acknowledgement of his position as a leader of the majority church? Could we skip the debate bit? Insulting women and patronizing women and restating a belief about what God wants women to do is not debate.

As many of us have already been unforgettably taught.

This article first appeared in the Sunday Tribune (Ireland, www.tribune.ie), and is reprinted with kind permission of the author.

NUALA O'FAOLAIN is an award-winning journalist and author of Are You Somebody? She lives in New York City.