For me, the challenge of last weekend’s referendum in Ireland was summarised by an 82-year-old man with whom I spoke in Wexford. He was the 12th born into a family of 16 children and he captured the issue brilliantly: “I don’t want what they have in England, but we can’t have what we have in Ireland.”
For those of us who supported the Yes campaign (for the repeal of the 1983 8th amendment to the Constitution, banning abortion except in circumstances where the life of the mother was at risk), the vote represented a resounding rejection of hypocrisies that have characterised Ireland for many decades.
The two-to-one vote in favour of repeal did not happen overnight (or as a result of the machinations of ‘liberal’ politicians or groups), but rather through the evolving recognition and conviction of a large majority of Irish people, young and old, rural and urban, that the absoluteness of 8th took no account of the life experiences and stories of real, living human beings, especially women.
Instead, it relied on a formulaic State-enforced morality. The Yes campaign (like the previous 2015 referendum on same-sex marriage), did not instigate change in Ireland, it simply reflected it and propelled it forward.
The Yes campaign and the end vote were built on the results of failures and successes in previous campaigns but, most importantly of all, they were based first on a widespread public unease that then became a deep dissatisfaction and ultimately a rejection of absolutist morality forced on a society despite the evident pain and suffering it manufactured, primarily for women.
The Yes campaign recognised the complexities and uncertainties of human life, the need for individual responsibility, the centrality of women in the debate and the rejection of the criminalisation of those who opted for the ‘travel abroad’ solution.
It is clear that the thousands of individual stories told by many brave women and their families (on both sides of the debate) had a profound impact on public judgement of the issue. Despite what many might like to believe (in Ireland and beyond), the Yes vote was by no means arrived at lightly or without deep personal and public reflection, debate and pain.
It represents the culmination of 35 years of intense struggle at all levels from a Citizens’ Assembly to a Parliamentary Committee; from extended debates in civil society organisations and political parties to, above all, very profound and public discussion.
The result will end decades of a ‘deformed faith-based’ ideology (theologies, Churches and those of faith do not all share the same certainties and absolutes on the issue) underpinned by parallel State-sponsored hypocrisy – the belief that Ireland was/is an exception – a beacon of light in a dark world.
Hypocrisy 1 – despite the many women, most recently, an (under) estimate of 3,500 each year, who travelled abroad, we insisted, Ireland does not have abortion. We have always had abortion but simply ‘not in our own backyard’, we conveniently allowed others provide it for us.
Following the 1992 referenda (where the right to related information and to travel were upheld despite efforts to restrict both) and where the risk of suicide by a pregnant woman as a legitimate reason for an abortion was rejected, the complexities and realities of the situation became clearer.
Ireland’s constitutional position ceased to be an effective statement of moral principle but rather became a matter of maps and of geography. Whatever people now decide about abortion post this vote, it will be decided openly in relationships, families and communities in Ireland and not in dark, anonymous and silent corners abroad to which it was relegated.
The Yes campaign recognised the complexities and uncertainties of human life, the need for individual responsibility, the centrality of women in the debate
Hypocrisy 2 – during the many debates around abortion in recent decades, it was frequently asserted that while having an abortion was a crime, ‘we’ would not actually invoke or implement the law. Instead, women who travelled abroad would be left to reflect on their guilt and shame in the knowledge of their ‘criminality’ and the danger of it being made public.
Far, far too many Irish women lived lives of shame, silence and scarring in the face of a nation which all too often sanctimoniously repeated the mantra of ‘cherish all equally’.
Hypocrisy 3 – while insisting that Irish women were equal in principle and before the law, they could not be allowed to take responsibility for one of their own life’s most important events. Others (male clerics, doctors, lawyers, lobby groups) would exercise that responsibility on their behalf (and for many of the same reasons that allows misogyny and violence against women to flourish). Women were equal but they couldn’t be trusted.
The equation in the 8th amendment that the ‘rights’ of an ovum in a woman’s womb (at the moment of fertilisation) was of equal importance to those of the woman herself represented an assertion of fundamental inferiority. The woman’s right to life and to health and well-being became ‘qualified and conditional’ in a manner that did not (and would never) apply to men.
The 8th amendment asserted and ensured a very fundamental gender inequality. The realities of the obtuse legal arguments around individual cases and ‘interpretations of the 8th’ in Irish courts since 1983 confirmed much of this.
Many Irish women, my mother included, became victims of such a deformed theology-based gynaecology (she almost lost her life) – men knew best, especially if they were clerics, consultants, lawyers and weak politicians.
Those hypocrisies and the dogmas and negativity that underpinned them have now been swept aside and the Irish are faced with the millions of personal, difficult and complicated challenges of being human. Like so many places elsewhere throughout the world, Ireland has ceased to be ‘exceptional’ and has become ordinary and needs to redefine its humanity in such everyday ordinariness.
The time for blame is over as is the time for apologising – blaming women, blaming the Churches, blaming doctors and lawyers while apologising to individual women over and over for the trauma and pain inflicted on them.
The time has finally arrived for taking individual and collective responsibility; for facing the intensely perplexing realities, wonders and magic of human sexuality and its outcomes; for revisiting the place of women (and men) in our society.
It is not a time for triumphalism but rather one for relief and reflection (on the arguments of the No agenda also). The debate will continue to be characterised by an intense ‘feeling it on our skin’ emotion, by received prejudice and fear, by continued misogyny and deep uncertainty about key elements of human identity and meaning.
Thirty-five years in the making – the end of the 8th amendment offers the possibility of a significant new beginning.
Colm Regan lives in Gozo and is a human rights educator.