On the daytime radio show in which the host gets paid almost
€500,000 per year to hear the concerns of the ‘plain people’ of Ireland, I
heard a middle-aged man proclaim his total opposition to the repeal of the
Eighth Amendment this week.
If his daughter became pregnant because of rape, he told the host, he
sincerely hoped she would choose to keep the child rather than go through with
an abortion.
A few weeks earlier, in a vast hall, I heard a woman tell an
audience of about 400 people that the act of giving birth “heals the effect of
rape”.
She called on the people at the Save the Eighth campaign
launch in the West of Ireland to stop rape from happening rather than kill an
unborn child.
She didn’t explain how that could be done.
At the same event, a woman told me that the proposed
legislation for unrestricted abortion would bring a culture of ‘social’
abortion to Ireland.
I was shocked.
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| Laying flowers at the graves of the Magdalene Laundry women in the heart of Galway City. Photo by Ciaran Tierney |
She made it sound as though some women decided to have
abortions in the same way as they decide what make-up to wear or what club to
go to on a Saturday night.
This deeply personal issue is not something that is
discussed much, if ever, among my circle of friends. But I am pretty sure that
no woman I know has ever opted to have a ‘social abortion’, given the trauma,
the heartbreak, the soul-searching, the sense of loss, and the secrecy
involved.
There is the fear of confiding in an Irish doctor, given the
very real threat of facing 14 years’ imprisonment, or of taking pills in
secret, without any guidance or medical support because of the stigma – in fact
the criminalisation – involved.
There is no doubt that people I have spoken to in recent
months on the ‘No’ side have sincerely held views, and that they believe right
is on their side.
And many people share their concerns.
But I live in the city where Savita Halappanvar lost her
life at just 31 years of age. The young woman in distress, who was found to be
miscarrying, died of blood poisoning after doctors declined to terminate her
17-week long pregnancy.
“This is a Catholic country,” she was told at University
Hospital Galway, a comment which made headlines all across the globe and shamed
huge swathes of the Irish population.
Regardless of whether or not Savita’s life could have been
saved, she was shown an appalling lack of compassion in a country which has a
long and shameful history when it comes to how it treats its women.
Every October, Savita is remembered at a candlelight vigil
in the heart of my city. The overwhelming feelings are of sadness and shame,
sadness that a beautiful young woman lost her life in Galway and shame that she
was treated in such a way.
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| The late Savita Halappanvar is remembered with a candlelight vigil in Galway each October. RIP. |
The candlelight vigil takes place in Eyre Square, just five
minutes away from the Magdalene Laundry where women were locked up for decades.
There is such raw emotion, sadness, and pain when a small group of people
gather to honour the women of the laundry each February.
The speeches at Bohermore remind us of how Irish women have
been discriminated against, shamed, and mistreated for decades.
I also live in the same county as the Tuam Mother and Baby
Home, another place which made headlines all over the world in recent years.
It could be argued that the way in which the bodies of 796
dead bodies were discarded around a septic tank has nothing to do with
Ireland’s current abortion debate.
But at the moment I am reading Alison O’Reilly’s harrowing
new book, ‘My Name is Bridget’, which looks at how a young woman called Bridget
Dolan was incarcerated against her will for the terrible ‘crime’ of expecting a
baby outside marriage.
As Alison puts it, she was “following in the footsteps of
more than a century’s worth of lost souls” when her family sent her in such
shame to the Tuam home.
In those days, unmarried mothers could be named and shamed
by priests from the altars of Catholic Churches throughout Ireland.
Their families were quick to judge and to bring them to the
grim institutions where they were shown no love as they struggled to survive.
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| Catherine Corless won a People of the Year award after uncovering the gross injustice at the Tuam Home |
“The mothers-to-be were generally sent into the Home either
by their doctor or parish priest or their family, normally arriving at the
forbidding front door around a month before they gave birth. When their time
came, they were offered no pain relief during labour, another facet of their
punishment,” wrote Alison.
Nothing to do with abortion, you might say, but a grim
reminder of our nation’s shame in the not-so-distant past.
For the children of these women, it was impossible to leave
this stigma and shame behind.
“You were just a bastard in their eyes . . . We were nothing
but a kind of scum, you weren’t normal because you didn’t belong to a wedded
family. It is totally crazy,” said one survivor last year.
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| Tuam Home survivor Peter Mulryan at his mother's grave. She was locked up in the Magdalene Laundry in Galway. |
This afternoon I undertook a walking tour of Galway with a
group of female foreign language students. The issue of the referendum came up
when they asked about the posters on lamp-posts and all of them were shocked
when they heard that a woman could face 14 years in prison for having an
abortion in Ireland.
Two of them had seen social media images of a ‘pro-life’
street procession in Limerick City at the weekend, in which young girls dressed
in their First Communion dresses marched behind a car which was blaring out The
Rosary from loudspeakers.
They found those images “totally crazy”.
A few weeks ago, I met a brave woman called Arlette who is a
member of a group called Terminations for Medical Reasons (TFMR).
Arlette is not the kind of woman to get up on a soapbox, but
her life was changed utterly when she was diagnosed with a case of fatal foetal
abnormality six years ago.
After being told that her baby was going to die, she was
then told that nothing could be done for her in Ireland. Her only options were
to travel to another country or to go full-term.
She spoke of the agony she went through, the sadness and
loneliness of her journey to Liverpool, and how she travelled home by boat
because she could not face the ‘plane.
Then she found out there were hundreds of other women like
her, women who were forced to travel to the UK or to carry a baby which had no
chance of life full-term.
And her pain and sorrow turned to anger, prompting her to set up TFMR with other women who had dealt with the same injustice.
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| Arlette Lyons of TFMR speaking in Galway |
One of her colleagues, Tracey, has spoken of the devastation of
being surrounded by revellers enjoying a weekend away on her short flight to
Liverpool on St Patrick’s weekend.
She was 22 weeks pregnant when she found out that little
Grace was terminally ill, with a condition which would ensure she would die of
respiratory failure upon birth.
“I couldn’t bare this happening to my baby,” she says.
“I spent four weeks nodding along to people’s excited
questions. I was slowly losing my mind. I had to go somewhere where they
understood what me and my baby were going through.”
The slogan of TFMR is to “stop punishing tragedy”.
Women in the terrible situation faced by Arlette and Tracey
should not have to deal with the shame and trauma of having to leave their
friends, family, and familiar faces behind after being given such devastating
news.
Abortion already is a reality in Ireland, but women facing
such a tough, life-changing decision are being forced to travel to the UK or
Europe for terminations or take illegal pills in secret at home.
Those who have been raped, sexually abused, or are carrying
foetuses with no chance of life deserve so much more than being criminalised,
with the threat of 14 years in prison.
It’s time to put an end to Ireland’s culture of shaming
women and brushing issues under the carpet, whether by locking up young women
in Mother and Baby Homes or condemning them to secret and lonely trips to
England.
We can put that shame behind us – and stop punishing tragedy
– by voting ‘Yes’ on May 25.
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