Polly Vernon
There’s a lot of news going down. This politician resigns, and that wannabe replacement stands and then stands down, and oooh! We’ve got a brand new PM, AND IT’S A LADY, but what’s going on with the opposition/brexit/chilcot? It’s relentless, fast-changing, unprecedented, anxiety-sparking and random; the pressure on broadcasters and newspapers to report it all – quick, quick, before it changes – is intense. Which is why some news is slipping by, virtually unobserved.
Take the 7 July defeat in the Irish parliament of the fatal foetal abnormalities bill, which proposed allowing abortions if a child would not survive outside the womb. The bill was rejected by a depressingly emphatic margin of 95 votes to 45 – yet the whole thing barely got reported, on account of All The Other News. I wouldn’t have known about it at all if Irish friends hadn’t messaged me in despair. These are women fighting hard to repeal the 8th Amendment, Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion. Women who’ve told me some flights and ferry services from Ireland to England serve as unofficial abortion shuttles (in 2015, nine Irish women a day made the trip across the Irish Sea seeking terminations); that all the stigma, trauma, shame and fear you might experience on discovering you’re pregnant when you don’t want to be, and on opting for a procedure your country and culture considers immoral, illegal and wrong, is further exacerbated by bloody travel arrangements.
On 7 July, these women lost a chance of access to legal abortion, even if the foetus they are carrying is so sick it’ll die moments after birth. This does not bode well for those same women getting access to abortion in other circumstances.
I’d hoped for better. Fourteen short months ago, Ireland’s referendum on gay marriage marked a triumph for progressiveness, enlightenment and compassion, one I’d assumed would ease the way towards reasonable abortion rights. But here I am, wondering yet again why women who believe abortion is wrong don’t just make sure they never, ever have any abortions, while leaving women who think differently to run their reproductive lives/bodies as they choose; and why men who believe abortion is wrong don’t just f*** off and wonder how they’d feel if the state passed laws about their testicles.