Mother Child Homes Discussion ###DO NOT POST WITHOUT READING 1st POST###

conorhal wrote: »

It all comes down to poverty in the end. People had to make pragmatic decisions and they did, because there was no other choice.

I read an interesting article a while back about a ‘village of witches’ in some particular East African nation. This particular village was filled with hundreds of women and it was almost wholly comprised of the ill, elderly and outcasts who had been condemned to that place because each had been kicked out of their respective communities on the basis of an accusation of witchcraft.
Now this sounds barbaric of course, but the Anthropologist writing the article found it difficult to blame their society and it’s strange superstitions. She concluded that what had happened to these women was a product of poverty rather then superstition.
Accusing these women of ‘Witchcraft’ was merely a societal rationalization to allow it cope with the unthinkable, abandoning the most vulnerable to starvation and death because the healthy members of society could no longer care for the weakest. You were not casting out your mother, your daughter or your ill child, you were casting out a witch, and that rationalization somehow made the awful necessity bearable or at least less painful. Wichcraft created a useful narrative that scactioned unpalatable but necessary choices forced on people by poverty.
Single mothers became ‘other’ in our society, not because of the church, or because of some peculiar quirk of the Irish character but because they were an unbearable burden on impoverished families in a time where there was no mickey money, council flat or child benefit, so it’s hardly surprising that single parenthood was a taboo.
If you stripped the latte liberals of everything but the clothes on their back, a single room that they had to share with their entire family and fifty quid a week to live on, then told them that their daughter had gotten herself 'in the family way', you have to wonder how fast they might come to some rather unpalatable decisions about what to do about the situatuation.
We can blame the Church, and society, but underneath all the rationalizations is the simple fact that when you are poor in a poor country there are unpalatable yet rational choices that we often cloak in the justifications available at the time. Compassion is I'm afraid often reserved for the rich, so too is revisionism.

conorhal wrote: »

Well it kind of does, if you have to do the unthinkable, cast out your own blood as a burden, you have to first dehumanize those you're going to do it to.