Ireland’s referendum: the battle over abortion

Irish citizens were the first to legalise gay marriage by popular vote three years ago, said Sarah Wheaton in Politico (Brussels). Now they’ve been given a chance to relax their abortion law – one of the most restrictive in the world. The Eighth Amendment of their constitution, which they voted for in 1983, forbids abortion even in cases of rape, incest and fatal birth defects. But this week, the Irish could vote to repeal it. The campaign started with a clear majority in favour, but conservative voters then grew fearful that the alternative proposals were not strict enough and in recent weeks support dipped below 50%. To reassure them, ministers promised to limit the period in which an abortion may be carried out “for any reason” to just 12 weeks (only Portugal, Estonia, Slovenia and Croatia have earlier cut-offs). But it may not have been enough to guarantee Ireland’s continuing “march towards the European mainstream”.

I’m far from reassured by the proposed “restrictions”, said Breda O’brien in The Irish Times (Dublin): they still make provision for abortion on grounds of “serious risk to health” to be available for up to 24 weeks. Since no distinction is made between physical and mental health, and since it’s the woman’s own assessment of risk that is likely to be the one that counts, 12 weeks will give way to 24. It makes no difference that, as in the UK, two doctors will have to sign it off. In the UK this soon became “no scrutiny at all”. It will be the same here. What those of us who are pro-choice must be ready to concede, said Brendan O’neill in Spiked (London), is that a real trade-off is at stake here: the liberty of a woman versus the life of an unborn child. And it’s right that we favour the woman’s freedom to choose, because the consequences of denying it are so hideous. Between 1980 and 2016, more than 170,000 Irish women and girls went abroad for abortions, mostly to the UK. Thousands order abortion pills online. Buying these is also illegal under that assault on individual autonomy, the Eighth Amendment.

As a teenager, I vividly recall the “frantic men and women with rosary beads” who led the campaign for the Eighth Amendment in 1983, said Donal O’keeffe in The Avondhu (Cork). “Their mania seemed to seize the country.” Oddly enough, abortion had not been on anyone’s agenda until then. But terrified at the prospect of other repressive rules being relaxed – that contraception might be made generally available and sex education, homosexuality and divorce legalised – conservative Catholics agitated for a constitutional ban on abortion precisely because they knew it would be an easy win. As they’d hoped, its success helped them block reforms in other areas well into the 1990s. Change came eventually, but the Eighth Amendment remains, dangerous and redundant – “a minefield planted during a war long ago lost”.