A Scarlet Letter to women on the Emerald Isle persists
Maureen Dowd DUBLIN — My parents chose my middle name, Brigid, as an homage to a beloved Irish saint.
According to legend,
St. Brigid of Kildare had some cool miracles in ancient times. She was a brewer who turned water into beer. She was a virginal abbess who conjured a comely maiden for her disappointed suitor.
But surely my parents didn’t realize that one of her miracles was reputed to be performing Ireland’s first abortion. She helped a young woman who had gotten pregnant by making her swollen belly disappear with no pain.
That may have been the last time the subject of abortion did not evoke pain in Ireland.
This country is in the midst of an existential battle over whether it should keep its adamantine abortion statute, giving an unborn baby equal rights with the mother. Under the Eighth Amendment, abortions are illegal, even in cases of rape or incest. The only exception is when it is believed that the mother will die.
The Eighth Amendment was added in 1983 to the Irish Constitution, a document drawn up in 1937 that was so steeped in Catholic principle, it was submitted to the Vatican.
Even as Ireland has leapt into modernity, growing more European and becoming the Silicon Isle as Britain lurches backward with Brexit, women have been left in the past, absorbing the shame of old stigmas.
It is a measure of the draconian views of the “No” side that they refer to pregnancies where there are fatal fetal abnormalities as “hard cases,” and most other abortions as “social abortions.”
Condoms and spermicides were allowed to be sold without a prescription only starting in 1985, the year after
Ann Lovett, a 15-yearold girl, died, along with her baby, during childbirth at a religious grotto in County Longford. “Ireland is obsessed with punishing women,” said Niall O’Dowd, the founder of Irishcentral.com.
Two of the most harrowing “hard cases” were the 1992 “X case,” when a 14-year-old girl who was raped by the father of a friend and became suicidal was barred from leaving the country to get an abortion, and the 2012 case of Savita Halappanavar, first reported by Kitty Holland in The Irish Times.
Savita, a 31-year-old married Indian immigrant and dentist, went to a Galway hospital in distress the day after her baby shower. She was told that her 17-week-old fetus could not be saved.
Over several days, she begged the medical staff to remove the baby to save her life as she developed every symptom of septic shock. But, because the staff members could still detect a heartbeat, they would not do it because, as one midwife told her, “This is a Catholic country.” Savita died four days after her baby girl, whom she named Prasa, was stillborn.
Things have not changed that since much. Women who want to terminate a pregnancy for almost any reason except imminent death still face a Scarlet Letter in the Emerald Isle; they have to leave the country and fly to England if they can afford it (3,265 women went in 2016) or order sketchy pills online and risk a prison sentence.
“The Eighth Amendment has never actually stopped abortion,” said Dr. Ross Kelly, a Dublin physician on the “Yes” side. “We’ve just been exporting Irish women abroad to deal with the reality that women access termination.”