Women and men teamed up in Ireland vote
Good news in hard times, hooray! Let joy be unconfined. The May 25 Irish referendum repealing a law banning abortion was the best evidence that women and men can work together for women’s rights and win the day.
When the Eighth Amendment died, Ireland embraced sunlit modernity.
It had done so with the help of the Irish young flying home to vote and a campaign to extract Ireland from a shaming, punitive Catholic Church long discredited by pedophile scandals. Britain had done its part, admitting more than 170,000 desperate Irish women in the last 35 years after they took ferry or plane to England for an abortion and then headed back, pale and perhaps bleeding.
Catholic-run Ireland — where every sperm is sacred — insisted women leave the country to do their dirty deed. Britain said hello, here’s medical care, would you like to sit down, have a cup of tea?
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said the landslide vote was “the day we came of age as a country. The day we took our place among the nations of the world.”
And to think Ireland freed its young women just as the U.S. stepped back into barbarism state by state, banning abortion, arresting women for miscarriages and locking up birth control. Poland, which bans almost all abortion, plans to ban them even in cases of fetal abnormality. In March, more than 55,000 women showed up for angry street protests against this.
Authoritarian governments are on the march. Abortion is completely prohibited in El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, and highly restricted in many other South American countries, the Guardian reports. The U.S. is keeping pleasant company, is it not?
Canada is gradually improving access to the abortion pill across each province. The Ontario government mandated bubble zones around abortion clinics, preventing protesters from tormenting, spitting on, and attacking patients and staff.
And Canada now allows assisted dying, though tragically not in dementia cases, and we will have to keep fighting. Social progress on health has a way of vanishing if you take your eye off it for a minute.
The next Irish battle is ensuring that a new law regulating abortion isn’t restrictive or intimidating.
Current planning suggests that abortion would be allowed up to 12 weeks, which is far too early a cut-off.
It would be allowed up to 24 weeks if there were a fatal fetal abnormality, a risk to a woman’s life or serious harm to her health, and after that, only in cases of fatal fetal abnormality. It is not clear what “fatal” specifically refers to.
And two doctors must give permission, an appalling system that Canada’s Supreme Court discarded in 1988 in the Morgentaler decision. This rule, as one activist said, would make Irish doctors the new priests.
Remember that in 2012 Irish doctors refused to perform an abortion and watched for days as a pregnant woman, Savita Halappanavar, slowly miscarried and died of sepsis. Now, eerily, those same doctors might decide.
The devil is nestled in the details, filing his claws on his horns. It is possible to win a referendum and then craft rules so narrow that a poor woman would have to beg for an abortion.
Why not allow women to request an abortion simply because they want one?
It was interesting to see Donegal as the only county in all of Ireland to have voted No, making an embarrassing red No spot on a voting map turned riotous green with Yes wins. It’s a large northern rural county with older voters, the young having left long ago for jobs and urban life. Every nation has its Donegal. Even in pro-choice Canada, antichoice protesters will still show up at Parliament Hill, on the street and at public schools, filming students without permission and handing out dubious fetus photos that anger some students and distress others.
You will find ugly postcards in your mailbox and banner ads on public buses purporting to show the horror of women taking charge of their bodies.
That’s the Donegals on the move, trying to make us more American. They will find Canadians not as polite as usual. They will find this particular Canadian quite irate.