O’Connor in 2014 (Bryan Ledgard, CC BY 2.0)

The tragic death last week of Shuhada’ Sadaqat (who went professionally by her original name Sinéad O’Connor) had me thinking about her life and wanting to know a bit more about her. Some of the things she said about abortion and her own experiences with it particularly drew my attention. So I bought and read her 2021 autobiography Rememberings.

What becomes obvious from reading the book is that O’Connor was an extremely complex person whose life resists any easy description in terms of a simplistic narrative. Perhaps best known for tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II as a protest against clerical sex abuse, she spent most of her life as a person with deep Christian faith and died a committed Muslim. She spoke out in support of the IRA in 1989, then later protested against them and called for Gerry Adams’ resignation from Sinn Féin.

The same complexity characterised her beliefs about abortion. She was strongly pro-choice and had an abortion herself – an abortion that she later spoke about in deeply ambiguous terms, an ambiguity powerfully on display in her song ‘My Special Child’.

It would be a futile exercise to extract some kind of simple moral from O’Connor’s life, or for either side of the abortion debate to try to claim that her story neatly vindicates their position. Instead, I want to look at one incident in O’Connor’s life and how it illustrates a particular complexity about abortion. The incident was O’Connor’s pregnancy with her first child Jake. She got pregnant unexpectedly during the recording of her first album. Her initial communication with her record company about it was perfectly pleasant, and they booked her a consultation with the company’s in-house doctor to, apparently “initiate her pregnancy care”. When she got there

The doctor told me Nigel [the record company executive] had already called him and expressed the wish that he, the doctor, would impress upon me the following, which he, the doctor, said in the following words: “Your record company has spent a hundred thousand pounds recording your album. You owe it to them not to have this baby.” Furthermore, he informed me that if I flew while pregnant, my baby would be damaged. And anyway, if I was going to be a musician I ought not have babies because a woman shouldn’t leave her baby to go on tour and at the same time a child can’t be taken on tour.

This one paragraph is astounding.

One thing to say about this is that it is an attempt to coerce someone into having an abortion. If O’Connor’s allegations are true, her record company tried to use the fact that they had invested money in her career as leverage to manipulate her into ending her pregnancy.

Another thing that’s noteworthy about it is the ease with which O’Connor’s doctor went along with the record company’s desires. This – doctors putting pressure on women to abort – is still disturbingly common: it’s a bit of an untold story of both pre- and post-repeal Ireland. I have personal friends and family members who experienced very similar things.

Another thing again is the way in which the doctor uses medical misinformation to try to get O’Connor to comply. The thing about flying is, of course, complete mumbo-jumbo. It can be a risk to fly if a pregnancy is very far along: but the risk there is just that you might go into labour on the plane! It’s a good reminder that neither pro-choice nor pro-life people have a monopoly on this kind of rubbish, and of how important it is to stop pathologising pregnancy.

It’s the final sentence that I want to focus on. The doctor, and the record company, made an implicit threat that O’Connor will have to choose between being a bad parent to her child by being a touring musician or compromising her own career. This, of course, all depends on the assumption that the social role of “being a successful musician” has some kind of immutable fixed essence that cannot be made compatible with that of “being a good parent.” This assumption is, of course, false, but it’s very convenient for the record company. They don’t have to change anything about their industry or take any hits to their bottom line to facilitate parents. Instead they can just say “this is the way things are, take it or leave it.”

Muireann wrote about this previously in a different context, that of Michelle Williams crediting her success as an actress to having had an abortion:

The requirement to have an abortion to make it as an actress may not be explicit, but that doesn’t make it any less real – the stories of Milano, Jamil and Williams demonstrate as much. The only difference is that instead of explicitly forcing women to have abortions, they are implicitly forced. Technically the woman “chooses” the abortion – hooray for choice! – but we all know the truth. She had no choice. Hollywood, like many other industries, has ingeniously managed to hide their exploitation of women under the very mantle of women’s rights.

I accept that many pro-choice people think that there is no “bad” reason to have an abortion. However, can we at least agree that there is such a thing as a bad reason to have to have an abortion? For example: if refusing to have an abortion will end your career. People may make apologies and excuses for Hollywood, saying that filming must proceed on schedule, and that studios can’t be expected to accommodate pregnant actresses – the exact same arguments that are made by and on behalf of firms that don’t want to make basic provisions like maternity leave. If we won’t let a bank, a law firm or a newspaper get away with that excuse, we shouldn’t let Hollywood get away with it either.

Williams’ story and O’Connor’s illustrate a crucial point: an abortion is often a response to an unjust situation involving discrimination against pregnant women or parents. The pro-life response is, or ought to be, to try to remove the discrimination and the injustice. Pro-lifers often say things like this: “In a better world, many fewer people would want or need to have an abortion. This would be because having a child would be much less of an impediment to doing many other valuable things. We should try to make the world better rather than using abortion to sidestep the real problems.” That’s often where the pro-life case stops.

A pro-choice person, though, might have a response like the following: “that may be true, but the world is bad now, and so women still need abortion as an option. It may be the case that the world doesn’t need to be like this, but in real life bad actors will ensure that women often do face a choice between parenthood and career success, and that choice shouldn’t be taken away from them while they wait for the world to improve.”

I think, for what it’s worth, that pro-choice people have a point here. Even if it would be better if pregnant women didn’t face these kinds of unjust choices, and even if ending these patterns of discrimination is an ethical political imperative, that still doesn’t mean that abortion should be off-limits as a response to these terribly unjust situations as long as they do persist.


What should make abortion off-limits as a solution is that it is itself a terrible injustice, a human rights violation, a killing of an innocent human being. The abortion debate has to be settled at the fundamental level if it is to be settled anywhere. 

But even leaving the fundamental question of rights aside, the way in which abortion impacts on society should still make pro-choice people uneasy. The fact is that as long as the option to abort a pregnancy does exist, that gives organisations like Sinéad O’Connor’s record company or the Hollywood studios that dealt with Michelle Williams an excuse not to change, an off-ramp removing the necessity to change the status quo. They can push the burden of injustice onto women and their unborn children. They can always say “at the end of the day, you have the choice to continue with the pregnancy or not, and thus the responsibility to live with the consequences of that choice.” And in a sense, they’re right. And so too are the millions of other, less high profile companies that present similar explicit or implicit choices to women all over the world. Abortion functions as an ‘escape valve’, releasing some of the tension that builds up as more women enter workplaces fundamentally designed for people without significant child-rearing responsibilities.

If abortion completely disappeared as a social institution, societies would face a stark choice: either return to the old ways and have women leave paid employment en masse, or fully complete the transition to an egalitarian economic system that properly recognises the claims of children and their parents. Pro-choice people seem confident that the first option would be the one chosen. I think it would be the second. But as long as abortion is still an option, it’s an option that powerful entities will put pressure on women to choose. Just as her record company did to Sinéad O’Connor, because, in her own words, “their only expressed concern was money.”

Ben