I WENT to an Irish Catholic secondary-school run by nuns who occasionally invited in pro-life groups to give us talks. Interestingly they were never referred to as pro-life by our teachers, just as ‘nice-people-who-are-like-us’. I remember one speaker ending a talk by handing out a poem with a drawing of a foetus on it to the class, which was written from the perspective of an unborn foetus asking its mother, but also the teenage reader, to let it live.
For a 14-year-old this was effective propaganda and strengthened the Catholic-school party-line at the time which was ‘abortion equals murder’ and being pro-choice means you are a baby killer. It was as simple as that with no exceptions.
This week and nearly 20 years later I am flying home to Ireland to vote for the repeal of an Amendment which means it is a criminal offence for a woman to have an abortion in Ireland. The 8th Amendment which was brought into law by popular vote in a referendum held in 1983, states that a foetus has equal constitutional rights to the mother. The debate was won – and has been protected ever since, by warping the issue into one binary and dangerously misleading question: you agree with killing babies or you do not.
It wasn’t until I went to college in Dublin, when I was exposed to people talking about the amendment devoid of religious ideology, that I learned I was living in a country that led people to believe that the outcomes of pregnancy were either a birth or a natural miscarriage, and by protecting the 8th amendment refused to accept the myriad of health complications that exist in between.
The fight to protect that law has resulted in women being denied medication they needed and in some case, dying. All in the name of saving lives, apparently. Currently under Irish law a woman who develops a health condition throughout her pregnancy, be it life threatening or otherwise, will be denied any medication and healthcare that her doctor feels poses any threat to the pregnancy, for fear of the legal repercussions.
Recent attacks on women’s reproductive rights in America by the Trump administration sadly means that this isn’t just a problem faced by women in more archaic corners of the world but women’s basic freedoms are up for debate again on a global scale. Disappointingly, I’d hoped Ireland repealing this Amendment would mean it was joining a more enlightened safer world.
I hope that the vote this Friday will see an end to years of propaganda that has deprived two divided camps from discussing the one issue rooted in medical facts and not religious ideology, which is simply, women’s healthcare.
