Ireland is having the abortion debate Britain needs

The referendum is much closer than expected. That’s because the issue is both personal and awesome

This Friday, Ireland votes on whether or not to scrap the eighth amendment to its constitution, which outlaws almost all abortions. The repeal side started far ahead in the polls, but its lead has narrowed; nearly one in five now don’t know how to vote or are keeping their decision to themselves. I’m not surprised. Irish voters are being forced to confront something that most societies have left up to politicians and judges to consider: the realities of abortion. The decision they face is at once intensely personal and awesome in its societal consequences. I would beg them, with every ounce of my being, not to repeal the eighth.

I went to Ireland last week and found a distinct lack of religion in the debate. When 67 per cent of the country voted for the eighth in 1983, it was a popular endorsement of its Catholic tradition. Today, the Church’s authority has evaporated and there’s a strong desire, in Dublin at least, to become more like the secular bits of Europe. The divorce ban was lifted in 1995; gay marriage was legalised in 2015. And since 1992 the Irish have had the right to go abroad to terminate a pregnancy. The strongest argument I heard from those who favour repeal is that women already have abortions – it’s just that the state forces them to fly to London to do it. So, why not tweak the law to reflect the facts of life? Especially when dealing with such ghastly tragedies as when a foetus has been given a fatal diagnosis.

This argument could have maintained an enormous lead, but the government overreached. Rather than drafting post-repeal legislation that would provide for abortion solely in cases of rape, incest or threat to the mother, it chose to offer abortion for essentially any reason up to 12 weeks (and on health grounds for an unviable foetus thereafter). This has left voters facing what many regard as a choice between two extremes: a near-total ban that makes almost no allowances for circumstance vs abortion on request in the first trimester. In which case, what does a foetus look like at 12 weeks? Can it feel pain? And what does an abortion actually involve?

These are questions we don’t ask in Britain, even though abortion occurs here on a scale that demands a second thought. There were 190,406 terminations in England and Wales in 2016. Say the number out loud. Listen to its size. It’s like an African famine that no one knows or cares about because the numbers seem so big and the starving so far away – until a camera crew shows up and suddenly we can see that these are real human beings in real pain. Ireland is being confronted not only with the awful narratives of women being driven abroad by the law, but also stories rarely contemplated because the only ones who could tell them aren’t around to do so. I refer to the thousands of children that were never born.

On Ireland’s streets there is a war of posters – every lamp post has at least two – and one message stands out. “In Britain 90 per cent of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted.” The repeal campaign calls this misleading; Down Syndrome Ireland describes political use of an image of disability as “disrespectful”. But it does speak to a truth that Britain has buried in a confused understanding of “choice”. The nations that have legalised abortion have in fact expanded the right to choose who lives and who dies, and the outcome is patently unjust.

Imagine two foetuses. One is born prematurely: the doctors fight through the night to save it. The other is taken to a clinic and aborted. In the womb, these two human beings were almost identical. The thing that separated them wasn’t their own qualities, but whether or not they were desired. One baby might be lucky enough to have two rich parents. The other could have a mother who is poor and alone. What real choice was practised here? And what does it say about a society that professes to want to give a fair chance to all, regardless of class or colour, that it doesn’t extend that right to those under nine months old?

These are the sort of disturbing questions the Irish have to answer, and with which I myself have struggled for years. I’m not a zealot. I can see the grey. And coming around to opposing abortion in the logical manner that the eighth amendment does has challenged many of my own assumptions. Stick with the pro-life philosophy and you find yourself concluding that we should fight the death penalty, house refugees and build a generous welfare state. To oppose abortion is not to try to control women but to imagine a society in which they can afford to be mothers, in which all of humanity is sacred. The pro-life position is not conservative. It is revolutionary and egalitarian.

Sadly, it has struggled to be heard above Ireland’s elite consensus, which is determined the country should “move forward”, as if historical momentum justifies itself. The anti-repeal side is praying for a Brexit moment, for a countryside rebellion against big city liberalism. It’s possible. I see hope in the polls. If it does happen, it won’t be because of residual Catholicism but because, when discussed openly, the issue presents itself as an utterly compelling matter of life and death.