From The Guardian today, on their live blog on the vote to repeal Ireland’s constitutional amendment from 1983 that equated fetal rights with the rights of pregnant women (and thus effectively outlawing abortion), this post at 6:17 PM local time sums up the result of the vote on whether to retain this amendment in the Irish constitution:
“Here we are, the final result. Returning officer Barry Ryan is announcing the result:
Yes: 1,429,981 NO: 723,632
A majority of 706,349 for yes
Ireland’s eighth amendment has therefore been repealed.”
Also from The Guardian, Henry McDonald, Emma Graham-Harrison and Lisa O’Carroll together have this summary article from today, which notes that the voter turnout was 64.51% of eligible voters, and also that:
“By voting yes in unexpectedly large numbers to abolish the eighth amendment to the Irish constitution, the country has enabled the government in Dublin to introduce abortion in Ireland’s health service up to 12 weeks into pregnancy.
Saturday’s triumph for abortion reformers occurred only months before a papal visit to the country – the first since John Paul II’s tour of Ireland in 1979. After Pope Francis leaves Ireland in August, the Irish minority government, with the backing of opposition parties, will within weeks start the process of drawing up legislation to allow for abortion, which was once an unthinkable political project in Ireland.”
One past incident that underlay the “Yes” vote was the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar in 2012, whose story was recapped in this Guardian article by Harriet Sherwood (also quoted by DK’er Jessica Sutherland in her Rec List diary today):
“Halappanavar was admitted to University hospital in Galway on 21 October 2012, when she was 17 weeks pregnant with her first child. Medical staff concluded that a miscarriage was inevitable but did not intervene – despite requests from Halappanavar and her husband for an abortion – as a foetal heartbeat could be detected.
A few days later, medics diagnosed infection as a result of ruptured membranes and, later septic shock. Halappanavar died on 28 October.”
In a separate Guardian commentary, Irish Labour senator Ivana Bacik noted the changes in attitudes among the Irish people, both before and after the tragic (and cruelly unnecessary) death of Halappanavar:
“Over the years, public opinion had thus shifted towards supporting repeal of the constitutional ban and for legal abortion to take place in Ireland. This change was also influenced by a number of international law cases in which the Irish state was found to have breached women’s human rights by forcing them to carry pregnancies to term even in cases where they knew their babies would not be born alive.”
Bacik noted earlier in her commentary:
“In truth, many people in Ireland had already recognised the reality that the eighth amendment represented an absolute bar to any lifting of the prohibition on abortion – even in cases of rape, risk to women’s health or fatal foetal abnormality.”
This kind of nuance is totally alien to American anti-choice nutters, of course.
In The Guardian’s live blog, there is a very interesting comment on the underlying thinking behind the “Yes” lean of the vote, from a past adviser to Fianna Fáil, Derek Mooney, who’s being a more than a bit flattering towards the voters (since we’ve all seen how democracy can produce bad results – yes, that does refer to Bernie-bros and Jill Stein-voting morons), but which does have a very sophisticated and, indeed, nuanced, feel to it:
“This referendum was about nuance, and Irish voters showed that they get nuance. So do voters in most countries. They know that very few issues are simply black or white.
Many voters, including those who had real qualms about some aspects of what the government proposes in its legislation, accepted the nuances and complexities, considered them and – on balance – accepted the case for repeal.
This is the seismic change that has happened in Ireland today. In a world that seems destined to rush to this or that easy populist position, Irish voters took the time to inform themselves. They listened to the expert opinions from all sides and weighed the arguments.
The political system afforded them that opportunity by having a long pre-campaign period where arguments, for and against, were calmly made.”
True, abortion and abortion rights are very divisive, to put it mildly, and while I am pro-choice, I can understand the physically visceral reasons behind why anti-abortion people hold their views, because of the sense of physical disgust that the procedure engenders. It can be very nasty indeed. But ultimately, why I’m pro-choice is my realization that it’s up to the woman in question to choose how she wants to handle her own person, and pregnancy. I may not always like or approve of her choices. The point, though, is that the choices are hers to make, whether good or bad, whether I personally care for them or not. That’s the nuance that the most rabid anti-choicers cannot grasp – or perhaps they do intuitively grasp it without realizing it, but they cannot bring themselves to let women make their own choices, and thus take responsibility for themselves. Even a Savita Halappanavar-like case in the USA would probably not be enough to make the most rabid anti-choicers see the folly, and dangers to women, of their ‘pure’ views. (A glance on Twitter of some of the reactions of fanatical anti-choicers in Ireland shows this.)
The subliminal aspect of this vote is that it negates a bad decision from 35 years earlier. Sherwood’s article noted a mural that had gone up last week in honor of Halappanavar, and some messages left at the mural:
‘…flowers and messages were left at a mural put up in Dublin last week to commemorate Halappanavar.
Ian Jennings, 24, said: “I’ve come down here specifically to say sorry to the women of Ireland and women like Savita that we let down.
“For decades in this country we turned women away, hid them and we shamed them and our generation has decided that we are never going to do that again.”
One message taped to the wall read: “I’m sorry. I hope this absolves our country’s guilt.”’
Of course, we will never see parallel contrition from Bernie-bros and Jill Stein-voting idiots who put Drumpf in power, to the continual disgrace of our country, and who have set women’s rights and abortion rights in the opposite direction of Ireland. Fanaticism isn’t just limited to the anti-choice right-wing, after all. Nor is short-term thinking, where the purity trolls expressed their HRC-hate, and thus destroyed the gains of the Obama years, in an instant.
The long-game mindset underpins the concluding point of a commentary on this referendum in The Atlantic by Yasmeen Serhan:
‘…not since voting to implement its constitutional ban on abortion 35 years ago has the country as a whole voted to the conservative side of a social issue. Though Ireland may continue to be a traditionally Catholic country, it began to shed its conservative culture when it legalized contraception (1985), divorce (1995), and same-sex marriage (2015). The “quiet revolution” Varadkar identified has also been a long and gradual one.’
That “quiet revolution” reference, from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, is from this RTE News video clip from Twitter:
“Well, I think what we have seen today, really, is a culmination of a quiet revolution that's been taking place in Ireland for the past 10 or 20 years. It’s been a great exercise in democracy, and the people have spoken. The people have said that we want a modern constitution for a modern country, and that we trust women, and we respect them to make the right decisions and the right choices about their own health care.“
Not much to say after that, it would seem.
With that, time for the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week…