In an overwhelming and defining vote which may hold lessons for Malta, Ireland has dropped its near-absolute ban on abortion following a referendum last Friday.
On such occasions, I am always reminded of the inspiration of the Enlightenment which, in Immanuel Kant’s words, is: “Dare to know. Have the courage to use your own reason!” It is about the right, in all conscience, to make your own choices. This is what Irish women have done.
For Irish Catholics (89 per cent of the population), the relevant aspect of the Church’s teachings would appear to have been that a person must not be prevented from acting according to conscience. The determining factor was the requirements of justice, which apply to all, and not the Church’s doctrine on abortion, which may be preached to all but forced on none whose conscience it offends.
The draconian Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution (“The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees its laws to respect... and by its laws to defend and vindicate that right”), which was inserted in 1983, has been toppled.
The amendment gave equal rights to the life of the mother and her unborn child. However, it duly came to be regarded not only as too restrictive (despotic even), but simply wrong. Rather than preventing abortion, the legislation merely displaced it – as in Malta – for those women who had the means and ability to travel overseas to terminate their pregnancies. Campaigners in the referendum who sought its repeal wanted the social changes which led to Ireland becoming the first country to adopt gay marriage by popular vote in 2015 to be extended to abortion, citing the thousands of Irish women who went abroad for terminations each year and the increasing numbers procuring illegal abortion pills on the internet.
Opinion polls in recent years have consistently indicated strong support for reform in a country which remained largely Catholic, but where paedophile scandals and other sexual abuse by priests and nuns had dented the Church’s authority.
Last year, in response to public pressure urging change, the government established a Citizens’ Assembly of 100 people to consider the need to reform existing laws. The great majority recommended that terminations should be allowed without restriction up to the 12th week of pregnancy and up to the 22nd week of pregnancy in cases where a woman was carrying a child diagnosed with a fatal foetal abnormality (meaning it would not survive outside the womb).
The Irish referendum has been deeply polarising with vicious Facebook rows, friends feuding and women who have had abortions unable to speak to relatives who were against abortion. And just below the surface, it exposed a well-spring of fury and rage against the Catholic Church’s clerical hypocrisy and paedophile cover-ups.
Interestingly, during the referendum campaign, the Church kept mainly silent, knowing its edicts would only galvanise opposition. A generation ago, a priest could knock on a woman’s door and ask why, now her youngest child was five, she wasn’t pregnant again. But since the child sex abuse scandal and clerical deception and the Magdalene laundries incarcerating unmarried mothers and trafficking their babies or throwing them in mass graves, the Church knew its moral authority was broken.
With the passage of new abortion laws and the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, Ireland has grown up
The Church also knew that this was its last moral stand after it lost contraception in 1980, divorce in 1996 and, three years ago, unimaginably, when it also lost the gay marriage referendum. As with gay marriage, and now abortion, a whole Irish generation is better educated, and more prosperous, ready to put behind them dinosaur laws such as the Eighth Amendment, which “enshrined equal right to life of the mother and ‘the unborn’”.
Indeed, the referendum was called because the majority of Irish women had already made the psychological shift in favour of making the final choice. Not just by their travels to have abortions in British hospitals, but also alone in their bathrooms taking abortion pills of variable internet reliability (three women every day, committing a crime, risking infection or ectopic pregnancy, fearful of seeing a doctor because of the law enshrined in the Eighth Amendment).
Throughout the campaign, the Prime Minister of Ireland and his party pushed for a pro-choice vote to legalise terminations, but anti-abortion groups targeted voters with controversial adverts and waged an online war on social media (as has recently been the case, for similar reasons, on amendments to the IVF legislation in Malta).
Although similar to many EU countries, the legislation to give women the choice of having an abortion on demand during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy will be a more liberal proposal than what applies, for example, in Britain, where since 1983 some 170,000 Irish women have “travelled” to hospitals abroad to terminate unwanted or unviable pregnancies.
One of the arguments during the referendum campaign has considerable resonance in Malta, where many pregnant women needing a termination go to Britain or Italy to obtain it. In Ireland, the pertinent question asked was: “Is it OK for women to go to England and avail themselves of a legal framework that is created by British politicians, but not OK to create an Irish (or Maltese) legal framework to deal with the Irish (or Maltese) situation?”
The Irish referendum has shown that in any modern society, the dominant voices supporting a woman’s right to choose whether to proceed to full term comprise not heathen radicals but ordinary families who believe that it is not the prerogative of government (or Church) to dictate when, and to how many children, a mother will give birth.
With the passage of new abortion laws and the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, Ireland has grown up. It has demonstrated clearly that, in the case of abortion, it is about the principle of not having women’s bodies policed by Church or State. With the passage shortly of new abortion laws and the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, Ireland has struck a powerful blow for freedom.
Only one corner of the European Union now forces women with unwanted pregnancies to travel abroad to obtain one.
Melita contra mundum.