Ireland – Abortion and Love

Abortion and Love
Ireland’s wildly successful movement to repeal the Eighth Amendment has given us a new way to frame reproductive rights.

By Katha Pollitt
June 7, 2018

“There must be a way to make abortion rights be about love,” the journalist Anthea McTeirnan said to me when we met in Dublin in 2015, just before Ireland’s referendum on marriage equality. Same-sex marriage was going to win big, she believed, because the campaign was all about love and compassion and inclusion, not just abstract legal rights. People could see that their friends and neighbors and relatives simply wanted to express their commitment to their partners the way straight people do. The campaign reflected that spirit, full of joy and humor; its guiding spirit was the sweet and popular drag queen and bar owner Panti Bliss. And, as it turned out, McTeirnan was right: That May, the referendum won by 62 to 38 percent, making Ireland the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage through a popular vote.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/abortion-and-love/


Eighth ‘prevents me from providing complete pregnancy care’

Eighth ‘prevents me from providing complete pregnancy care’
Doctor says two women travel for abortions weekly after foetal abnormality diagnosis

May 3, 2018
Sarah Burns

Two women a week have to travel abroad as a result of the Eighth Amendment to terminate a pregnancy after receiving a diagnosis of a complex foetal abnormality, a consultant in obstetrics and maternal foetal medicine has said.

Dr Jennifer Donnelly, from the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, said the amendment, a constitutional provision which guarantees the mother and unborn an equal right to life, “prevents me from providing complete pregnancy care to women and their families”.

Continued: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/eighth-prevents-me-from-providing-complete-pregnancy-care-1.3482876