[Irish pro-choice activists had to overcome a rigid constitutional
ban on abortion that was in place for more than 30 years. They
succeeded by putting mass mobilization and a confident assertion of
the right to choose at the heart of their campaign. ]
[[link removed]]

IRELAND’S STRUGGLE FOR ABORTION RIGHTS SHOULD BE AN INSPIRATION FOR
THE US  
[[link removed]]


 

Sinead Kennedy
August 22, 2022
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Irish pro-choice activists had to overcome a rigid constitutional
ban on abortion that was in place for more than 30 years. They
succeeded by putting mass mobilization and a confident assertion of
the right to choose at the heart of their campaign. _

March for Choice organized by the Abortion Rights Campaign at Merrion
Square, Dublin in 2015., Photograph: Eric Luke/The Irish Times

 

In May 2018, the Irish electorate voted by a two-to-one majority to
remove or “repeal” the prohibition on abortion, known as the
Eighth Amendment, from the country’s constitution. While opinion
polls had suggested that pro-choice campaigners would win, most
predicted a nerve-rackingly close result; certainly no one anticipated
the sheer scale of the victory and the support for abortion access
found across every section of society, from young to old, urban to
rural.

In the aftermath of the recent US Supreme Court decision to
overturn _Roe v. Wade_ and the introduction of abortion bans in at
least ten US states, the history of the Irish struggle for abortion
rights can offer some insights into the lived reality of blanket bans
on abortion and, perhaps more usefully, illuminate how the struggle
for abortion rights can be won in a country where abortion has been
bitterly contested.

Origins of the Eighth Amendment

Following a referendum in 1983, Ireland became the first country in
the world to give constitutional protection to the fetus, thereby
copper-fastening the Irish state’s long-standing ban on abortion.
The Eighth Amendment equated the life of a pregnant woman with that of
a fetus, making abortion illegal in all circumstances except where
there was a “real and substantial risk” to the mother’s life
(the nature of this “real and substantial risk” was never actually
defined or codified in law).

The Irish antiabortion movement that orchestrated this constitutional
referendum was just one front in a broader attempt by the Right to
undermine and contain the growing secularization and liberalization of
Irish society in the 1970s and ’80s. It had attempted to mobilize
around several different issues, but it was only around abortion,
specifically fetal rights, that it succeeded in gaining any traction.
Drawing on the iconography and ideology of the 1970s US antiabortion
movement, the Right successfully utilized the dominant Catholic ethos
of the Irish state and society and convinced politicians to hold a
“pro-life” referendum to enshrine fetal rights in the
Constitution.

Feminists and other activists opposed to the “pro-life” referendum
were deeply divided on the strategic question of how to respond to
this attack from the Right. Moderates argued that Ireland was too
conservative for a pro-choice campaign and that the only way to defeat
the referendum was to focus on the legal and technical problems that a
constitutional ban would create. Those favoring a more pro-choice
perspective argued that the reality of abortion should be
foregrounded: abortion might be illegal in Ireland, but at least seven
thousand Irish women were traveling to Britain every year to access an
abortion.

However, the majority of activists considered the pro-choice position
too “radical,” and the moderate position quickly came to dominate
the campaign against the Eighth Amendment. As a result, women’s
experiences of pregnancy and abortion were not just absent but
actively omitted in public discussions.

Certainly, the political climate in the Ireland of the 1980s was
intensely hostile to abortion from the beginning, and the political
terrain of the referendum campaign was determined by the antiabortion
right. In those circumstances, a pro-abortion argument was unlikely to
break through and win the referendum. But as some argued at the time,
if the antiabortion argument had been faced honestly and openly
addressed, pro-choice campaigners might not have won, yet they might
have succeeded in creating space for a pro-abortion position to be
advanced and developed in Ireland and, crucially, for the voices and
experiences of Irish women to become part of the debate.

The victory of the pro-amendment campaign by a two-thirds-to-one-third
majority meant that it was now impossible for abortion to be made
legal in Ireland without another referendum. Furthermore, the nature
of the campaign set back and demoralized the pro-abortion movement for
decades, making it harder for activists to argue for a position that
they had previously denied or minimized.

The X Case

Struggles over abortion have always reflected the wider dynamics at
play in any society. By the end of the 1980s, Irish conservative
forces found themselves unable to hold back the tide of secularization
and liberalization. The collapse of Catholic hegemony, long in the
making, was accelerated by horrifying revelations of clerical sexual
abuse, forced adoptions, and the incarceration of pregnant women in
Magdalene Laundries and “mother and baby homes.” It was in this
context that the case of “Miss X” entered the public domain in
1992, shattering the antiabortion consensus that had dominated Irish
society.

In 1992, the Irish state initiated a High Court injunction against a
fourteen-year-old rape victim — known only as Miss X — and her
parents, preventing them from leaving the country to access an
abortion in Britain. When news of the injunction broke, thousands of
people spontaneously protested around the country, demanding not only
that Miss X be allowed to travel for an abortion but that she be
allowed to access that abortion in Ireland.

Faced with thousands of angry protesters on the streets, the
government paid for the parents of Miss X to appeal the injunction to
the Supreme Court. With no sign of the protests dissipating and with
threats of strike action in the air, the court ruled that Ireland’s
“pro-life” constitutional amendment did in fact allow abortion in
these circumstances, because the young girl was suicidal.

Certainly, it is possible to isolate any set of words with the
Constitution and lend them a specific, if surprising, set of meanings.
However, it is highly doubtful that this somewhat unusual ruling was a
result of abstract legal logic alone. Instead, it appears to have been
as much the result of pressures exerted on the court by the sheer
scale of mass mobilization.

The X case was a turning point in the struggle for abortion rights in
Ireland and a powerful reminder that our rights are not gifts bestowed
from on high by progressive or enlightened individuals. It also
illustrated the fact that when faced with all the complexities of a
real-life case and not an abstract debate around fetal rights, the
antiabortion consensus collapses.

The 1992 controversy irrecoverably changed public opinion on abortion.
But political cowardice and inaction by mainstream politicians meant
that women in Ireland would continue to be dragged through the courts
to access fundamental health care while others would die waiting for a
lifesaving abortions.

A New Wave of Struggle

Between 1980 and 2018, at least 180,000 women and girls traveled from
Ireland to access abortion services in another country. Abortion was
accessible for people living in Ireland if you had the means and the
ability to travel, but it was a different story for poor, migrant, and
marginalized women, in particular women of color. While abortion
rights activism was evident in Ireland, it usually involved small
numbers of dedicated activists, organizing in the face of political
indifference and public apathy.

But a new phase in Irish pro-choice activism began in 2012, laying the
foundations for one of the largest political mobilizations in the
history of the state: the referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment.
In spring 2012, on the twentieth anniversary of the X case judgement,
small numbers of pro-choice activists began to reorganize themselves,
determined to make meaningful progress on abortion rights after
decades of inaction and ineffectual legal strategies that put the
emphasis on lawsuits, legal reform, and appeals to the European
courts.

Engaging in a variety of tactics, activists intensified their work,
developing networks of support for women traveling abroad for abortion
and working with the Abortion Support Network
[[link removed]]. They developed links with online abortion
providers like Women on Web
[[link removed]] and WomenHelp.org
[[link removed]] and developed creative ways to ensure that
abortion pills could navigate customs controls and get into the hands
of those who needed them.

The first ever “March for Choice” took place in September 2012 and
successfully mobilized thousands of activists around the country.
These protests were particularly significant as this was the first
time that significant numbers of people mobilized in support of an
explicitly pro-choice agenda. While most Irish activists considered
themselves to be pro-choice, they had usually stopped short of
mobilizing around this explicit demand, fearing it would alienate
Irish society, which was understood to be ultraconservative on the
issue.

This approach was profoundly challenged by a tragic event in autumn
2012. Unlike the 1992 X case, it became impossible to contain. In
October 2012, Savita Halappanavar, an Indian woman living in Ireland,
presented to hospital miscarrying at seventeen weeks. Doctors felt
that due to the presence of a fetal heartbeat they could not treat
her, citing the Eighth Amendment. This proved fatal, and she died of
three days later of septicemia.

The death of Halappanavar provoked a wave of national and
international horror at Ireland’s punitive abortion regime.
Thousands gathered in silent vigil outside the Irish parliament, the
Dáil, immediately after the story broke. Days later, tens of
thousands marched in Dublin, with simultaneous demonstrations across
the country, chanting “Never Again.”

The Irish political establishment, which had managed to successfully
maintain the conspiracy of silence around abortion since the 1992 X
case, found itself under enormous pressure to at least appear to act.
Still fearful of a vocal antiabortion lobby, political parties
supported the introduction of legislation to permit doctors to perform
lifesaving abortions while simultaneously copper-fastening the
criminalization of abortion with doctors and women who had illegal
abortions facing criminal penalties of up to fourteen years in prison.

The Repeal Campaign

The death of Halappanavar galvanized the pro-choice movement into an
intense campaign to pressure the government into calling a referendum
to repeal the Eighth Amendment. Activists began mobilizing through
protests, art, street theater, and various forms of direct action.
Mindful of the discords that had plagued the pro-choice movement in
the 1980s, activists began to develop broad-based coalitions of groups
and organizations, all of whom had different positions on abortion but
were willing to come together in support of Repeal, as the campaign
became known.

The movement was further emboldened when in 2015 Ireland became the
first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by a popular
vote. For many abortion activists, this pointed to a dramatic change
in Irish culture and society. The positive, joyful tone of “Yes
Equality” was seen as a model for a future Repeal campaign where
abortion could be framed as a positive good for women and society more
generally.

In 2016, a group called “Strike for Repeal” organized around a
global demand for women to strike on International Women’s Day.
Their actions inspired thousands of young people across the country to
walk out of schools and universities, shutting down Dublin’s city
center for several hours.

As a direct result of this intense campaigning by pro-choice
activists, a referendum on Repeal continued to feature intensely on
the political landscape, reaching a point where it became politically
damaging for politicians to pander to the antiabortion right or, most
significantly, to appear to have a cautious and indifferent approach
to abortion. Once the referendum was announced, activists united
together under an umbrella-type campaign, Together for Yes (TfY),
which became the official campaign for Repeal.

What was most significant about TfY was that unlike previous abortion
campaigns in Ireland, activists began from the perspective that people
were movable on abortion. Activists saw their role as convincing
voters, some of whom might be personally against the idea of abortion,
to support removing the constitutional ban and allow women to make
these decisions for themselves. Repeal, they argued, was not about a
person’s personal views on abortion; rather, it was about the type
of society that we wanted to live in.

Victory

There were some limitations to the “official” TfY campaign. Too
often its spokespeople were professionals, like doctors and lawyers,
and it focused too much on the so-called “hard” cases, rarely
foregrounding “the right to choose” as a demand.

This meant that in the aftermath of the referendum, despite the scale
of the victory, the movement struggled to effectively oppose newly
proposed abortion legislation that was highly restrictive. Access to
abortion was strictly regulated, especially after twelve weeks of
pregnancy, and it continued to be a criminal offense for doctors to
provide abortions outside the strict circumstances provided for in the
new law.

While this cautious strategy was born out of the difficult and painful
struggle for abortion rights in Ireland, it was frequently and
effectively challenged by the movement’s own grassroots activists,
who gave Repeal its energy and dynamism through their conviction that
change is possible. From the day the referendum was announced,
thousands of activists on the ground — the majority of whom were
women who had never been politically active before but felt that this
campaign was too important to simply watch from the sidelines —
began canvassing, knocking on doors, and talking to people one-to-one
about abortion. This was the mainstay of Repeal.

When the votes were counted in May 2018, the campaign had reversed the
result of 1983. This time, there was a two-thirds majority in support
of the right to abortion.

In the immediate aftermath of the referendum, journalists and
political commentators heralded the result as nothing short of
revolutionary. They interpreted it as part of the growing liberalizing
and “maturing” of Irish society. The role of grassroots activism
was quickly and firmly marginalized by such analysis as mainstream
politicians and pundits scrambled to “own” the campaign,
proclaiming that they been in favor of abortion all along.

These were usually the same individuals who had criticized the Repeal
campaign as a failure due to its apparent lack of political
leadership
[[link removed]].
The problem with this type of analysis is that it understands politics
as something that happens in corridors of power and influence. It is
oblivious to any form of democratic “leadership” that does not
involve a charismatic leader, ignoring the women and men, young and
old, who were blossoming into leadership roles in every town and
community on the island.

A Necessary Choice

If there is one key lesson to be taken from the struggle for abortion
in Ireland, it is that it is possible to win enthusiastic, majority
support for abortion rights through popular campaigning and
mobilizations. In Ireland, it was only when the movement shifted its
tactics away from the supposedly pragmatic emphasis on legal
strategies and political and international lobbying — all of which
were designed not to alienate voters — that it began to make
progress. By doing so, it convinced people not simply to tolerate
abortion but to embrace it as a necessary choice for an equal and
inclusive society.

This approach proved highly effective in the more recent struggles for
abortion rights in Argentina
[[link removed]] and Colombia
[[link removed]].
A strategy of this kind also played an important role in the recent
decisive defeat of the right-wing initiative to strip abortion rights
from the Kansas
[[link removed]] state
constitution. Furthermore, mobilizing and winning the majority to the
idea of abortion rights offers people a sense of ownership over the
struggles and the subsequent rights won. It reminds us that rights
belong to us and are not gifts that can be bestowed or stolen by
judges and politicians at will.

It is also politically the most effective way to insulate abortion
rights them from future attacks. In Ireland today, even the
antiabortion movement concedes that attempting to restrict abortion
access would be difficult to achieve, given both the scale and the
nature of the Repeal victory.

Even more significantly, Repeal has emboldened a new generation of
activists who understand the power of grassroots mobilization and who
are learning that Repeal was just one victory, albeit a a deeply
significant one, in the larger battle for reproductive justice. They
understand abortion not just as a set of individual rights but as part
of a larger struggle for gender, sexual, health, and economic justice
for all.

_Sinéad Kennedy was cofounder of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth
Amendment. She is the author, with Camilla Fitzsimons, of Repealed:
Ireland’s Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights (Pluto Press,
2021)._

* abortion rights
[[link removed]]
* ireland
[[link removed]]
* mass movements
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]