On Irish Abortion Legislation and ‘Lapgate'

(kinda shitty post, but the heat melts my brain and I wanted to write something)

Last night, after a 21 year long wait, X-case legislation was passed in the Dáil at 127 to 31. However, it’s not law yet – it still has to go through the Seanad and the President’s office. While this is a momentous occasion in Irish history, and a step in the right direction for women*’s reproductive freedom, it is not without its issues.

The legislation brings clarity to doctors – a pregnant person can now undergo any treatment to save their life, even if that treatment will result in a miscarriage or involves ending the pregnancy. It takes one doctor to decide if the woman* is literally at death’s door, and two if she’s only a little bit dying. However, to force a woman* who is suicidal as a result of her pregnancy to plead for her life in front of a panel of doctors (one of which has to be an OB despite the fact that it’s a mental health issue, not a pre-natal issue) is cruel. If they do not unanimously agree, she must go to another panel, and they could take 5 to 7 days to come to a decision. They could take a week to decide whether or not to help, when a person contemplates suicide waiting for their verdict.

Mental health is real health, and this is something the legislators seem to not fully understand. If someone has gotten to the point where they would subject themselves to this kind of backwards and patronising system because their pregnancy is not something they can handle, they need help. They don’t need to be submitted to this trial where they are not even certain that the outcome will be to save their life and end the pregnancy. This legislation will do nothing for people who are suicidal as a result of their pregnancies. However, some women* may go through this panel. These are the women* who are too poor to travel for a termination and migrant women* who are unsure of their immigration status. These are some of our most vulnerable women, yet we will subject them to this cruel, humiliating process to beg for their lives.

The legislation also contains a jail sentence for those who terminate in Ireland, or those who help them terminate in Ireland. Under the 1861 Offences Against the Persons Act, which made abortion completely illegal in Ireland, this crime warrants life of penal servitude. In the new legislation this has become an undisclosed fine and up to 14 years imprisonment. No one has ever been prosecuted for self-inducing in Ireland under the old legislation, and we have been assured that this will continue with the new legislation. Why then, was it included at all? Why even make the threat to criminalise women who self-induce with pills in their own country? Why add to the stigma surrounding abortion? While this threat may only apply to doctors who perform abortions ‘illegally’ (i.e. when the pregnant person is not actually dying), there is a worry that it could also be used to prosecute those who provide abortifants, or collect them from the North, as they are supplying the means to carry out an abortion. Whether anyone is ever prosecuted for self-inducing, only time will tell.

This is the bare minimum. This basically tells Irish women* - 'if you're pregnant, and will die if you remain pregnant, we'll end your pregnancy'. It isn't bringing in abortion on request, and it also isn't abortion up to 9 months. After the point of viability, if the pregnancy needs to be ended to save the life of the pregnant person, a c-section or early induced delivery will be performed, not an abortion. While that seems painfully obvious, the anti-choice crowd have been using that as a means by which to 'kill the bill'. They would rather women* die than have a termination. That's not 'pro-life'.

Various amendments to the bill were proposed while it was being debated in the Dáil over the last few days. All amendments to broaden the bill were defeated. Terminations in cases of rape or incest were defeated because they don’t fit into the tiny box that is the Supreme Court interpretation of the law – that terminations are only allowed when there is a real and substantial risk to the woman*’s life, including through suicide. Interestingly enough, though not surprising, amendments trying to remove the suicide claus from the bill were also tabled. One has to wonder how the government could legislate for X (as we are required to do by the European Court of Human Rights), if we leave out suicide. The X-case is the reason the interpretation included suicide as a real and substantial risk to the woman*’s life. We have two referenda (1992 and 2002) where the people could have opted to remove ‘in case of suicide’ from the law; we chose not to.

Terminations for medical reasons, when the fetus has a fatal abnormality and will not survive outside the womb, were also left out, despite the argument that the fetus will never live outside the womb, and so their right to life cannot be seen as the same as the right to life of the pregnant person. These are generally much wanted pregnancies, and yet we export these grieving families to the UK and elsewhere if they chose to end the pregnancy.

The defeated amendment which baffled me the most was to allow for terminations during an inevitable miscarriage. Currently in Ireland, if you miscarry, you’re told we can’t help you, just go home and wait. Depending how far along the pregnancy is, this waiting could take three or four days. This was the only amendment which could have saved Savita Halapanavar had this legislation been in place a year ago. In countries where abortion legislation is broader, you can chose to end the miscarriage via a D&C. This results in the cervix being open for a considerably shorter amount of time, thus reducing the risk of infection, and can also reduce the mental anguish of the person miscarrying.

One distinction that anti-choicers repeatedly used was the misinformed idea that abortions are different from necessary medical interventions which end a pregnancy. Soz, nope. In cases of ectopic pregnancies, the zygote is pretty much directly targeted and removed. Obviously, if an ectopic pregnancy is left untreated for long enough, the damage to the fallopian tube can be so great that it must be removed. This is often done in very Catholic hospitals – patients must wait until their tube is so damaged before they can receive treatment, because then you can say that it’s not really abortion. This misguided argument has also been used when discussing this bill, despite the fact that the word ‘abortion’ isn’t used once, it’s always called a medical procedure or medical intervention. Sarah Malone deals amazingly with both these points in a recentinterview (also note how it’s two middle aged, British men arguing against a young, Irish woman about abortion in Ireland…)

It was not only the legislation which caused controversy over the lst few days at the Dáil. During the first sitting, which went on til 5am, Tom Barry TD pulled Áine Collins onto his lap and held her there while she was clearly uncomfortable, only releasing her after a pat on her very lower back. A number of male TDs around them are seemingly unbothered by this behaviour. During a debate about women’s reproductive rights, a female TD is sexually harassed. Because what happened was sexual harassment. Collins later accepted Barry’s apology, but that doesn’t mean it was OK. It shows the way in which the Dáil is still very much set in a Mad Men era. Excuses have been made, ranging from the fact that the heating wasn’t on (it was a 27 degree day), the few drinks he’d had (why our politicians are allowed drink while debating life and death legislation is for another day) or simply that it was ‘silly’ and a bit of ‘horseplay’.

We haven’t exactly come a long way in the last 21 years regarding abortion legislation in Ireland. This legislation is not yet law, and odds are it will face many more hurdles set up by the anti-choicers and misogynist politicians, but I’m confident that it will pass, and Ireland will be a slightly safer country for pregnant women*.

But it’s important not to get complacent. We shouldn’t wait another 21 years, or for another tragic death, before we get the 8^th Amendment repealed. We need a referendum to remove this out-dated, religious-based, misogynist article from our constitution. Then, we can make real progress with reproductive rights in Ireland. 

On the 'Rally for Life'

Today, I went to the counter protest for this year’s Rally for Life, despite really not being in the mood for it and the heat being something terrible for a stereotypical pale Irish women like myself (my foundation shade is ‘Siberia’. Wish I was kidding). Unlike the anti-Youth Defence protest which I went to last week, which turned out to be a great experience, today was nothing but horrible.

We hung out near the Garden of Remembrance beforehand, and there were far more older people there than I was anticipating. Like, way more. This was even more noticeable as we stood lining either side of O’Connell street as they marched. I’d say maybe 15-20% of attendees were women of childbearing age, i.e. people who would actually find themselves in a crisis pregnancy situation. The rest were men, old people and children.

Now, I understand that it is sometimes necessary for children to attend rallies -child-minding is not something that everyone has access to. But it is *incredibly* disturbing and unsettling to see young children chanting anti-choice slogans and holding signs. As for the older people, especially the older men, while they had every right to protest, the thought of them deciding to what I, a woman of childbearing age (albeit one with fertility problems) do with my (c)uterus is ridiculous. And I told them as much as they passed me.

While for the most part it was a peaceful protest, there were some issues which I feel are worth noting. My sister was with me, and in the 30˚C heat, she was wearing a romper suit and no tights. An old man came up to her and decided that it was perfectly ok to sexually harass her, to sexualise an unwilling participant, one who has only just gone 18 but who looks young enough to still pay child fare on the bus. My sister is a fairly headstrong person when it comes to these things. While I avoid nightclubs like the plague due to this kind of offhand, socially accepted sexual harassment (and worse), she still goes out, and I believe that she probably has somewhat thicker skin than I do when it comes to this kind of thing. But today, we had to leave the line of protesters and go somewhere more private so that she could have a bit of a cry and gather herself.

This was not an isolated incident. Another young woman said she was leered at and looked up and down multiple times. The despicable behaviour of the anti-choicers isn’t limited to sexual harassment. Many people who weren’t white were told to “go back to Africa”, and one woman was told that “she was too fat to have kids anyway”. Many were carrying pictures of a C-section calling it an abortion. The Gardaí said that there was nothing they could do about these images, despite the number of children in attendance. One man picked up his young child and shook him at us, ignoring the fact that his child was crying and visibly upset at being shaken at a group of strangers. Many anti-choicers used the Nazi salute and one said 'Heil Hitler' to a protester, although we don't know whether it was in jest or because he's a racist (Fintan O'Toolbox recently did a post on Youth Defence's links to neo-nazis). There were numerous placards which seemed to have escaped the screening process at the Garden of Remembrance which likened abortion to the holocaust. While I cannot say for sure that nobody at the counter-protest were being dicks, nothing has come to my attention as of yet, and we do tend to not be racist pervs.

The amount of money these people have to spend is ridiculous. It’s depressing and nauseating. Attendees were herded through one gate at the Garden of Remembrance in order to take away their homemade posters (usually because of their overly religious slogans – Youth Defence like to pretend they are secular, despite their massive links with the church and the fact that I’ve never seen more monks, nuns and priests in the space of one hour in my life). They are supplied, instead, with hundreds of shiny, printed posters in bright colours, which aren’t exactly cheap to print. There were three city tour buses rented and decked out for the occasion. There seems to have been a stage and a sound system erected at the finishing point of their march, which was something that I definitely wanted to give a miss. It is clear that US Anti-choicers are pouring thousands of dollars into Irish campaigns in order to keep Ireland ‘abortion-free’, while conveniently forgetting about the 4,000+ women* who travel for terminations and the 1,000+ women* who self-administer at home with pills.

This year’s march has been heralded as the biggest one ever, and the reason is because of the proposed X-case legislation. Slogans like ‘Kill the bill, not the child’ and ‘there’s always a better option’ were commonplace on the standard issue placards, showing pure ignorance of this legislation. The proposed legislation is the bare minimum; and even saying that’s a stretch. What this bill is doing is ensuring that women* don’t die as a result of their pregnancies. But it belittles women* and mental health when they force a suicidal woman* to plea for her life in front of three doctors, one of which has to be an OB, despite it being a mental health issue, not a pre-natal health one. The people who are opposing this bill do not care about women. They do not care about mental health issues. They care about shaming women* for choosing what’s best for them in a difficult situation, and continuing Ireland’s legacy of reproductive slavery and forced pregnancy , something which is deemed a war crime everywhere except Ireland. The European Commission of Human Rights has told us that we *have* to legislate for X. The people who oppose this legislation are effectively saying that they’re totes OK with breaches of human rights and denying basic human rights to pregnant women*. They are either incredibly bigoted misogynists or deeply, woefully ignorant. But they are losing this battle. Legislation will be passed, and we’ll be one (small) step closer to living in a country which gives a shit about its women*.

Despite this step in the right direction, we're still a long way off having any real, accessible legislation, let alone free, safe and legal abortion on request. As it stands, I would not be comfortable getting pregnant in this country under current, and proposed, legislation (though when and if I become a parent is still a *long* way off). If I was to be overly optimistic, I would say that when my potential future children are my age, they'll live in an Ireland with accessible abortion services. In reality though, it may well be my potential future grandchildren who have the right to choose.

I’ll leave you with one of the chants used today, and at many other protests, which highlights the true feelings of those protesting against legislation. “Pro-life, that’s a lie – you don’t care if women* die”.