Ireland | Rights to Life

ON A BITTERLY COLD EVENING this January, the south street of Dublin’s Merrion Square reverberated with the chants of over 20,000 protestors. They had rallied there facing Leinster House, where the national parliament of Ireland meets, to add their voices to an argument that has been dividing the country for decades—over a woman’s right to abortion. Buses that had been privately rented to transport pro-life activists from church parishes around the country, lined the streets. The throng held up plastic signs, distributed by organisers, which declared, “I vote pro-life,” and called on the government to “keep your pro-life promise”, thereby making it clear that the demonstrators wanted no change to Ireland’s thoroughly prohibitive abortion laws.

Abortion is illegal in the Republic of Ireland under the Offences against the Person Act (1861), a British law that remained in force after the country gained independence from the UK in 1922. In 1992, the Supreme Court of Ireland delivered a landmark ruling in the case of a suicidal 14-year-old girl known as “X”, who had become pregnant because of a rape but was denied permission to travel to the UK for a termination. The court asserted that a woman had a right to an abortion in Ireland if she faced life-threatening circumstances, including suicide. But the strong political influence of Ireland’s Catholic majority, and the Church’s dominance over other social institutions, have sustained highly conservative social policies and a forceful anti-abortion lobby; for more than 20 years, the Irish government has failed to create legislation that would permit abortion in circumstances such as X’s.

Ireland’s abortion debate shot to the headlines last November, when news broke about the death of Savita Halappanavar. The 31-year-old dentist from India was 17 weeks pregnant when she presented at Galway University Hospital, in October, with severe back pain and was told she was miscarrying. She died of septicaemia a week later, on 28 October, after having been denied a potentially life-saving medical termination, which she repeatedly requested. Doctors said their “hands were tied” due to Ireland’s strict abortion laws.

Halappanavar gave a human face to the abortion issue in Ireland, mobilising a new wave of pro-choice activists. The night the news broke, on 14 November, over 2,000 protesters gathered outside Leinster House in shock and anger at the young woman’s death, holding a sit-down protest and demanding changes to abortion laws. In December, the Irish government announced plans to legalise abortion in cases in which a woman’s life is at risk, including through suicide. It is expected that the new law, which the government has promised to pass by this summer, will give legal clarity to the right to abortion in Ireland in cases in which a woman’s life is threatened.

Some metres away from the January anti-abortion protest, a few hundred pro-choice supporters stood silently in a counter-demonstration along the sidewalk and in the empty parking spaces on the west street corner. They stood in the shadow of the looming stage erected for the protest, divided from the pro-lifers by barricades fencing off the south street. Amongst them was 23-year-old Suzanne Lee, a young woman with facial piercings, who had a homemade placard around her neck. It read: “I had an abortion”.

“The majority of people on the other side of that fence don’t have wombs,” Lee said of the pro-life campaigners, when I asked her why she came to the vigil. “They’ll never be pregnant. Some of them will never have sex. I’m here to show that I have a womb. I’ve had an abortion and they don’t represent me.”

The decision to terminate her pregnancy was not a rash one, Lee said. She and her boyfriend waited together for the results of a pregnancy test. They discussed their options thoroughly over two or three days. “It was a very difficult thing to do,” she admitted. “We made lists. Could we afford a child financially? Could we afford a child emotionally? And the answer was just no. So many people shout at me, what about the father? But, he made that decision too.”

Every single day, 12 women on average travel abroad from the Republic for Ireland for terminations. But the effects of economic recession in Ireland means fewer women can afford to do so; in the UK, the cost of the procedure alone (leaving aside post-procedure care) ranges from £350 to £1,775. Lee was unable to go to the UK for an abortion without asking friends for financial assistance, and she was unwilling to face the trauma of travelling alone to an unfamiliar city for a termination. She decided, instead, to order abortion pills online through a reputable organisation called Women on Web. The non-profit body, which seeks to help women access safe abortions in countries where it is illegal, has its origins in Women on Waves, an organisation which arranges for safe, professional and legal terminations on a boat in politically neutral waters.

Lee had to answer 25 questions online about her medical history and go through an online consultation with a doctor. She was under nine weeks pregnant, the limit for a medical abortion. She paid a minimal donation of €90. The medication was delivered to a friend’s house in Northern Ireland, where restrictions are less severe, and Lee travelled back with the pills to Dublin. In effect, she had smuggled drugs across two borders.

In her own apartment, with her boyfriend there, she took the two abortion pills over two days. After the second pill, Lee experienced heavy bleeding for over 8 hours and was unable to leave the bathroom. The medication caused her to vomit repeatedly over the course of the termination.

In the weeks and months following Halappanavar’s death, in a backlash against Ireland’s anti-abortion laws, numerous vigils and protests took place across Ireland, India and the world. Only months after her own abortion, Lee was moved to tears by the estimated 20,000 who took to the streets of Dublin demanding, “Never again”.

But the resurgence of the abortion debate in Ireland also gave the Church and religious groups abroad incentive to rally public support and reassert influence. The executive director of NET Ministries in Ireland, Tony Foy, whom I watched demonstrating proudly at the January protest, his young daughter on his shoulders, said the abortion debate has finally given priests something to “preach about and stand against”. His team of young missionaries, who have chosen a life “contrary to culture” and who believe sex is for marriage, are working hard to inspire young people in Ireland and motivate them to reaffirm their faith. “Savita’s case was hijacked by the pro-abortionists,” he told me. “We have to tell the truth that there’s a life there that’s independent, with rights equal to the mother and not contrary to it.”

Lee believes that in relentless pursuit of their own agenda, the pro-life lobby strives to ingrain in women a deep sense of guilt about abortion. “They always try to tell me what my foetus would have looked like, that it had fingers and toes,” she said. “They are lying. Every day during my pregnancy I researched what my foetus looked like, and at the time of my abortion it was the size of a grape.” Even before legislation, she feels, change must begin with the way the issue is articulated, particularly by the media. “Irish reporters will ask, do you not feel ashamed? What stigma have you faced?” she said. “All the Irish interviews will talk about aborting the ‘baby’ whereas foreign media will talk about the ‘foetus’.”

Lee suggested that she is probably not the ideal poster-girl for Ireland’s pro-choice platform; her abortion is “not as good as others”, she told me. Within the pro-choice campaign, she said, there are people who would not have supported her decision to terminate her pregnancy. Her foetus did not have a fatal anomaly. Her physical and mental health was not at significant risk due to her pregnancy. Rather, she had decided, after serious consideration, that she didn’t want a baby.

Last October, Lee appeared on BBC’s The Nolan Show in Northern Ireland to talk about her abortion—following this, pro-life activists have tracked her down on Facebook, calling her the “spawn of Satan” and the “bride of the devil”. For Lee, these religiously motivated remarks were ironic because, until the age of 18, she herself had been a member of the Church and had supported pro-life views. In the course of her religious practice, she grew more aware of the constraints placed on women’s freedom by the Church. “In some ways that helped a lot in becoming pro-choice because I could see within that, women were so looked down upon; they weren’t equal,” said Lee.

This February, a report by Ireland’s Health Service Executive investigating Halappanavar’s death was leaked to the Irish media. It concluded that, to prevent the spread of infection, an abortion should have been considered by the doctors attending to her even before the couple requested it. Tests showing the possibility of infection the day Halappanavar was admitted were never followed up on; her septicaemia had remained undetected for three days. It is hoped that Ireland’s promised new abortion law will protect the interests of women like Halappanavar, whose lives are endangered by their pregnancies. But there is little indication that the law will address the broader concerns of thousands of women like Lee, who do not meet the threat-to-life requirement, and will continue to face the same isolation, stigma and physical danger in the event of an unplanned pregnancy.