THEY took up space on the BBC news website on the same day, the Chilean president and the SDLP leader, a major politician and a minor one with half a world between them, voicing very definite ideas on the same painful issue: abortion.
Michelle Bachelet's father was tortured during the Pinochet military regime and died in jail. She was later arrested, with her mother, also tortured, released into exile. Chile's first woman to be president, socialist, declared agnostic, divorced mother-of-three - pretty unlike the SDLP leader all the way round the block. But here they both were by a fluke simultaneously addressing, if not equally confronting, one of the most divisive issues in modern politics, with the potential to immediately change lives. There are a few parallels. Bachelet is a paediatrician. Alasdair McDonnell, as he reminded his interviewer, a GP.
Both are highly aware of Catholic Church statements. Bachelet will be fighting the Church all the way to the statute book with her proposal to lift Chile's absolute ban on abortion, part of her promise to tackle the position of women, reproductive rights, poverty and inequality.
Her law would allow abortion when the pregnancy risks the life of the mother up to the 12th week of pregnancy, for girls up to the age of 14 until the 18th week, in cases of rape, and when the foetus is so badly deformed that the baby wouldn't survive. McDonnell told the BBC that as a GP he knows it is impossible to predict foetal damage, or survival, so he wants no such proposed liberalising here. This is the SDLP's considered response, presumably, to the consultation paper published by Stormont justice minister David Ford, the Alliance leader.
McDonnell didn't mention the Church, didn't say he was speaking as a Catholic GP. But his assertion follows the recent pronouncement from Archbishop of
Armagh Eamon Martin, as well as a response to the archbishop by Martin McGuinness. Who effectively said, you may remember, that he'd go with liberalising the law to recognise the hardest of medical cases.
The old IRA boss talked about compassion, women faced with awful decisions which only they could make. His party is anti-abortion, he said, but fatal foetal abnormality should be an exception.
As for the archbishop's stern warning, McGuinness thought he was as good a Catholic as he could be, presumably giving notice that no, he won't be excommunicating himself.
Wielding his medical experience, the SDLP leader at the weekend went further than the archbishop. McDonnell rejected, indeed rubbished, Ford's narrowly drawn focus on fatal foetal abnormality. The SDLP is 'unequivocally opposed to abortion, even in those particular circumstances because basically, the predictions in those
circumstances are never accurate.' As is his habit, McDonnell kept on talking. "I have seen situations where termination or an abortion was recommended to somebody because a foetus that had this, that or the other thing, and that foetus grew up to be a perfectly normal child," he told the BBC.
Out of deep religious principle, or prudent unwillingness to clash with the Church? Surely not simply to put clear blue water, as another commentator has it, between the SDLP and Sinn Féin? The most likely explanation is a mixture of the lot - personal conservatism, a panicky grab for the older, more devout voter, plus a dollop of trademark McDonnell clumsiness and a stunning lack of sensitivity.
He is an unpopular party chief, heading a party on a probably unstoppable slide, object of much malicious criticism, undermined from the outset. But some of his enemies may approve of his latest manoeuvre, and new position. The SDLP leader and MP for South Belfast at the weekend put himself into sharp contrast with the northern leader of Sinn Féin, the SDLP's sworn foe at present engaged in kicking them into the margins.
In the absence of genuine centre ground McDonnell and his party will back away from going into formal Stormont opposition. Maybe now, though, they can win the morals debate on the doorsteps. (Despite supporting gay marriage, which some of the devout may wear. But never anything remotely like freedom for women to choose.)
Bachelet made her case on national television, that criminalising abortion had not stopped it, that thousands of women risked losing their lives each year because of the ban. "This is a difficult situation and we must face it as a mature country," she said.
Ireland, north and south, has an alternative to maturity. It's called Britain, and online purchase of abortion pills.