Vote breaks last Irish bastion
PM hails ‘quiet revolution’ as ballot ends in huge pro-choice win
The Irish have swept aside one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the developed world in a landslide vote that reflects Ireland’s emergence as a socially liberal country no longer obedient to Catholic dictates.
With all ballots counted and turnout at a near-historic high, election officials reported that 66.4 per cent voted to overturn Ireland’s abortion prohibition and 33.6 per cent opposed the measure.
The outcome of the referendum was a decisive win for the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution. The 1983 amendment enshrined an “equal right to life” for mothers and “the unborn” and outlawed almost all abortions — even in cases of rape, incest, fatal fetal abnormality or non-life-threatening risk to maternal health.
“What we have seen today is a culmination of a quiet revolution that has been taking place in Ireland for the past 10 or 20 years,” Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said.
The turnout was 64.1 per cent — the third highest for a referendum vote
since the adoption of the constitution in 1937 and decision to join the European Economic Community in 1972. By comparison, turnout was just over 60 per cent when Ireland voted to legalise same-sex marriage in 2015.
Ireland’s political leadership promised that Parliament will quickly pass a new law guaranteeing unrestricted abortion up to 12 weeks and beyond that in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities or serious risks to a mother’s health. That would bring Ireland’s access to abortion in line with the other 27 members of the European Union. In Ireland, seeking or providing an abortion has been punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Since 2013, there has been an exception for when a mother’s life is at risk.
Varadkar, who is gay and whose right to marry was only accepted in Ireland three years ago, called the vote a turning point. “It’s also a day when we say no more. No more to doctors telling their patients there’s nothing can be done for them in their own country, no more lonely journeys across the Irish Sea, no more stigma as the veil of secrecy is lifted and no more isolation as the burden of shame is gone.”
Campaigners for repeal, watching the votes being counted in auditoriums around Ireland, were giddy with news of a landslide. In Dublin constituencies, the vote topped 75 per cent for repeal.
In elderly, traditionally conservative Roscommon-Galway, the only constituency to reject same-sex marriage in the 2015 referendum, the “Yes” vote for overturning the abortion ban was 57 per cent.
Exit polls released by Irish broadcaster RTE and from the found women outpolled men, but men still supported the ‘yes’ side. So did
farmers and rural counties. Support was largest among the young and urban. Of the Republic of Ireland’s 26 counties, only Donegal in the far northwest voted down the repeal.
columnist Finan O’Toole tweeted: “For all the attempts to divide us into tribes, the exit poll shows that every part of Ireland has voted in broadly the same way, which is to trust women and make them fully equal citizens.”
Although Ireland bans abortion, it does not restrict travel for it. Researchers estimate that about 3500 women make the trip to Britain each
year and that another 2000 end their pregnancies with pills they buy over the Internet and smuggle into Ireland. A central figure in Ireland’s abortion debate has been Amanda Mellet. In 2011, Mellet was forced to choose between carrying a dying fetus to term in Ireland or to travel abroad for an abortion. In June 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Committee found Ireland subjected Mellet to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, while also violating her right to privacy. The UN decision required Ireland, for the first time, to compensate a woman for the expenses and emotional dis- tress tied to an abortion.
Social change in Ireland has been profound. In the 1990s, homosexual activity was criminal here. Divorce was forbidden. It was still difficult to buy a condom, the sale of which was outlawed until 1985. Within a generation, all of that has changed. In 2015, the majority-Catholic nation of about 4.8 million people was the first country to legalise same-sex marriage by referendum.
Beginning with the issue of contraception in the 1960s, public opinion began to veer from the teachings of the Catholic Church as the Pope reaffirmed the prohibition on birth control against the recommendations of a commission composed of theologians, physicians and others.
Outrage over clerical abuse compounded doubts about religious authority, said Gladys Ganiel, a political sociologist at Queen’s University Belfast. People did not cease identifying as Catholic, or believing in God, but became more comfortable following their own conscience over church dictates.
The European Values Study found in 2008 that 92 per cent of Irish people believed in God, representing a drop of only 5 per cent since 1981. Still, the share of the population identifying as Catholic has fallen from 92 per cent in 1991 to 78 per cent in 2016, census data says. Ganiel said economic changes, combined with eventual loosening of laws on the sale of contraceptives, undermined an alliance between priests and mothers that was central in maintaining Irish conservatism. “The 1990s are also when Ireland becomes economically prosperous for the first time.”
Daithı´ O´ Corra´in, a historian at Dublin City University, said familiar patterns have transformed religion in Irish society — including urbanisation, greater education and generational differences. “Ireland is just a very different country now than it was in 1983,” he said, referring to when the Eighth Amendment was endorsed by 67 per cent. “I suppose after contraception, after divorce, after marriage equality, this — legal abortion — really is the last bastion.”