And the word was NO!
That may be about to change.
In Ireland a historic vote has taken place, a vote to repeal their 8th amendment ban on abortion which was passed in 1983. The New York Times has several articles and commentaries about the vote, which is expected to repeal it by a huge margin according to some polls. (Official results should be available today.)
Understanding Ireland’s Vote On Whether To Keep Its Abortion Ban by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura and Megan Specia is a ‘backgrounder’ which attempts to lay down the facts of the story and provide context.
Ireland’s abortion laws are anchored in the Eighth Amendment to the country’s Constitution. They are among the most restrictive in Europe, with abortion effectively outlawed in nearly all cases, including rape, incest or crisis pregnancies.
In the referendum on Friday, Irish voters cast ballots on whether to keep or repeal the Eighth Amendment. Repeal would mean that abortion becomes legal throughout the country.
emphasis added
A more accurate description of what would happen is found farther into the article.
If the vote favors repealing the Eighth Amendment, its current language would be replaced by the phrase: “Provision may be made by law for the regulation of termination of pregnancy.”
emphasis added
What this means is that repeal is not the end of the story — just the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next.
Draft legislation released before the referendum would allow for relatively unrestricted abortions up until 12 weeks of pregnancy, subject to consultation with a doctor and a short waiting period. Beyond 12 weeks of pregnancy, termination would still be possible — up to 24 weeks — if two doctors determined that a woman’s life was threatened by the pregnancy or that there was serious risk to her health.
Translating the vote into law is not the end of the process — it’s all the things that go with it. What doctors will perform the procedures? How will they define the procedures? What standards will be set for ‘appropriate’ medical care? How will people obtain access and how will they pay for it? What social consequences will they bear?
If anything, US experience has shown that legalizing abortion doesn’t end the controversy over the issue. One of the reasons a certain portion of Trump’s base supports him despite his personal history as a sexual predator is because his administration promises to impose the kind of state ‘morality’ Ireland is poised to reject. The move to fill the Supreme Court with conservative activist judges means that it is only a matter of time until Roe V. Wade comes up for review — and overturn if they have their way.
For the Irish, the vote is about coming to terms with their past and their identity. A couple of points in the article linked above touch on this.
“It takes a post-colonial society a long time to figure out who and what they are, and part of that identity formation in the early years and right up to the end of the 20th century meant that the state and the society expected women to be a particular sort of woman,” Dr. McAuliffe said. [She is identified as a lecturer in gender studies at University College Dublin — xaxnar]
...“It was a democracy, definitely, but it was very much informed in terms of social policy by religion and by particularly Catholic ideology, so we could call it a democratic theocracy,” Dr. McAuliffe said.
emphasis added
What is part of the motivation to repeal the amendment are the revelations of truly horrific conduct on the part of Catholic institutions and leaders within Ireland. Charles P. Pierce listed the details in his end of the week round up. Here’s an excerpt:
...The control of the Roman Catholic Church over Irish secular life was virtually destroyed by the cascading scandals of the past 20 years—the Cloyne Report, the Christian Brothers, the Magdalene Laundries, the horrors of the Bon Secours Home in Tuam. In 2011, in response to the findings in the Cloyne Report, then-Taoiseach Enda Kenny rose in the Dail Eireann to tell the Vatican that business as usual in Ireland was over. It was a remarkable speech and a giant gust of fresh air coursing through a relationship that had gone corrupt and rancid long ago.
As of this writing, the people of Ireland were still voting, and the result was supposed to be very close. But there is very little doubt that what the late author John B. Keane, in his fine novel The Bodhran Makers, called “the Clan of the Round Collar” has had its deadening grip struck off many of the institutions of a secular Irish republic. People are coming home to be free. That is never a bad thing.
There’s also the problem of justifying the ban on abortion when it was well known that Irish women who could afford it simply left the country to have abortions. Even that was a crime until recently. Again from the NY Times:
In 1992, a 14-year-old rape victim was prevented from traveling to Britain for an abortion. After that, Irish voters passed a constitutional amendment that left the abortion ban intact but recognized a woman’s right to travel outside the country for an abortion.
Also a factor were well-publicized cases of women who died for lack of proper medical care.
The 2012 death of Savita Halappanavar, an Indian-born dentist living in Ireland, gave momentum to the current call for change. Dr. Halappanavar was admitted to a hospital while having a miscarriage.
Doctors told her the fetus would not survive, but because it still had a heartbeat, the medical staff initially denied her requests for an abortion. By the time the fetus no longer had a heartbeat and was removed, Dr. Halappanavar had septicemia, an infection from which she died.
For many, the arguments against abortion (and contraception) are inextricably bound up in the morality determined by their religious views, which means addressing their objections on a secular basis is a non-starter. No means no, and there is no room for compromise on that basis. There are several points that transcend that position however.
One is that the burdens of imposing this view fall almost entirely on women. Given the patriarchal nature of much religious doctrine and history that seems to go with monotheistic sects, this is not unexpected, or something that is compatible with the ideal of equality between the sexes.
Doctrines developed centuries ago are in conflict with the realities of a world where effective contraception allows for sexual activity apart from procreation, a matter of choice that has only lately become possible in human history. The idea that sex outside of marriage or marital sex that by choice does not end in procreation is sinful has more to do with world shaped by authoritarian desires to use religion for power over others, and a time when life expectancies were short, infant mortality was high, and producing as many children as possible was both a social and personal good.
Another is that it places the state in the position of imposing a particular religious doctrine on all, whether or not they share those beliefs — a matter of religious freedom. This is why the people trying to do the imposition frame it as a violation of their ‘religious freedom’ — there is no logical response to that argument that can accept its validity.
A third is that medical technology can now diagnose a number of conditions that mean a fetus will never come to term, will be born with severe handicaps, or will have a short and painful life. Granted, there’s room for arguments about what quality of life actually means and what matters — but a hard and fast ban with no distinctions leaves little room for those on either side of the issue.
A commentary in the NY Times by Aoife Walsh and Davin O’Dwyer lays out their personal experience. They learned their child would have no hope of ever being born alive. They ultimately chose not to have an abortion — and found that professed concerns about the rights of the unborn leave something to be desired. From “Mourning Our Daughter, While Ireland Votes” —
This sad reality is in keeping with the traditional Roman Catholic culture that still permeates society. The same Catholic ideology that campaigns to protect the unborn didn’t believe that the unbaptized — never mind the unborn — were worthy of full burial rites (as grimly demonstrated by the story of Davin’s hometown, Tuam, where 796 children were buried unrecorded). To this day, it is a culture in which the lives of the unborn are sacred in some respects and largely disregarded in others.
This fundamental contradiction ultimately makes those posters and billboards so difficult to look at.
This is the conclusion they arrived at.
We decided not to go to England [for an abortion — xaxnar], and it was the right choice for us. We are grateful for the time we had with Cara, and we are proud to be her parents. But it isn’t the right choice for everyone in that situation — other parents, acting out of a sincere love and concern for their child, might make a very different decision.
Our heartbreaking experience taught us that such a decision should never be shrouded in shame and stigma. This referendum is a chance for everyone in Ireland to leave such shame and stigma behind. We have, instead, the opportunity to replace them with trust and real empathy.
Maeve Higgins also has a commentary: What Irish Women Know. She tells the story of a friend, who had had an abortion years earlier. She describes the experiences of a co-worker suffering a miscarriage — who had to go to a hospital via streets filled with pictures of fetuses. She describes the fear they have all been living with, all these years, about the culture of shame and blame that has been the privilege of others to place on women who have abortions no matter their circumstances, no matter even when it’s medically necessary. She discovered an anger, an energy she hadn’t known she had, upon realizing what she and her friends had been living with all these years.
That same rage Alison has been experiencing, that fury emanating from Terri, I have it now, too, but strangely it doesn’t feel new. It’s been there all along, I didn’t notice because it was just an ember, struggling to stay alight among ashes, unable to ignite fully without oxygen. There’s this feeling I get in Cobh, in Ireland, particularly among women, and I wish you could feel it, too, because it’s extraordinary. It’s something like electricity but really a more ancient source of power, like fire, and the thing about fire, of course, is that it’s catching.
The Independent reports exit polls show an overwhelming vote to repeal the 8th amendment, with a large turn out by the young.
Exit polls predict the Yes vote passed comprehensively in urban and rural areas alike with the result expected to be in the region of 69.4pc to 30.6pc.
As expected, Dublin carried the strongest repeal vote at 79pc. In Leinster the Yes vote is expected to be 67.2pc. Munster came in at 66.3pc. Even the normally conservative Connacht/Ulster voted 62pc in favour.
One of the biggest stories emerging from referendum day is the enormous numbers of young people who turned out to vote.
However, many of those over 65 also voted for change.
More than 72pc of women were in favour and 66pc of men, according to an exit poll carried out by Behaviour & Attitudes for RTÉ.
Given the current political climate and the narratives that are in play in the media in the US, it will be interesting to see if what is happening in Ireland is picked up here, by whom, and what if anything will follow.