Abortion—The Real Irish Lessons

Road to Repeal: 50 Years of Struggle in Ireland for Contraception and Abortion (new book)

by Tomás Mac Sheoin
Feb 01, 2023

In August 2022, Fintan O’Toole, a journalist with the Irish Times, published an article in the New York Review of Books giving his interpretation of the lessons to be learned from the Irish experience with abortion. O’Toole first outlined the history: in 1981, right-wing groups, buttressed by American support—including financial support—formed the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign, which persuaded the Irish government to propose a referendum to include a ban on abortion in the Irish Constitution. The ban was passed in 1983, becoming the constitution’s eighth amendment.

O’Toole outlines three problems with legal bans on abortion. First, they simply do not stop abortions: in 1985, 3,888 women traveled from Ireland to England to terminate their pregnancies; in 2001, that number was 6,673.

Continued: https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/abortion-the-real-irish-lessons/

01.02.2023

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Ireland – Protesters call for removal of barriers to abortion

Saturday, 29 Oct 2022
By Colman O'Sullivan

Around a thousand people have marched in Dublin to mark the tenth anniversary of the death of Savita Halappanavar and to call for changes to abortion laws.

Speaking at the Garden of Remembrance before the march set off, Orla O'Connor of the National Women's Council called for an end to the three-day waiting period before a woman can get an abortion and the abolition of the 12-week limit.

Continued: https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2022/1029/1332157-abortion/

Ireland changed when Savita Halappanavar died – it must continue to change

On the ten year anniversary of the death of Savita Halappanavar, Lynn Enright reflects on how she galvanized a nation and how there is more to be done.

by Lynn Enright
27th Oct 2022

Whenever and wherever abortion is illegal, there are horror stories. Stories so grim and so gruesome they make you weep. A tale of a suicidal child forced to carry the foetus of the man who raped her; news reports of a young woman rooting through blood-soaked rubbish before reporting her housemate, who took illegal abortion pills alone, to police. In 2012, came a story so bleak that it changed a nation.

Savita Halappanavar was 31 in October 2012 and she was 17 weeks’ pregnant; it was to be the first baby for her and her husband, Praveen. If you’re carrying a longed-for baby, the 17-week mark is a nice stage of pregnancy. The morning sickness is usually gone and it is around then that you’ll feel the first flutters of movement, a tiny kick here and there.

Continued: https://www.image.ie/agenda/ireland-changed-when-savita-halappanavar-died-it-must-continue-to-change-606207

27.10.2022

Ireland: Abortion and science

Science is far from silent on the adverse consequences for women of restrictive abortion laws

Sat Oct 22 2022
Dr. Peter Boylan

Sir, – William Reville argues that science is silent on the ethics of abortion and that leading scientific journals cannot present “science’s position on abortion – science has no position” (“Why science remains silent on the morality of abortion”, Science, October 21st). He suggests that, following the overturning of Roe v Wade by the US supreme court earlier this year, it is a function of democracy that, “For almost 50 years American conservatives lived with universal access to abortion. Now American liberals must live with restricted access to abortion.”

It is American women and girls, both conservative and liberal, who must now live with the dangers of restricted access to safe and legal abortion. Moreover, science, in the form of evidence-based research and data, is far from silent on the adverse consequences for women of restrictive abortion laws. The science is clear that such laws do not result in fewer abortions, but instead put the lives and health of women at greater risk by compelling them to depend on unsafe and illegal abortion.

Continued: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/2022/10/22/abortion-and-science/

22.10.2022

For Churches, Abortion Politics Is a Double-Edged Sword

Ireland and Poland went in entirely opposite directions on abortion. Why?

By Amanda Taub
Sept. 21, 2022

For the past several years, as I have struggled to put the escalating tumult of global abortion politics into some sort of order inside my own mind, I have returned over and over to two events.

They happened in different countries, in different years. They produced opposite outcomes. And yet I could not shake the feeling that looking at them together might help me understand something important about the way the world works.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/world/europe/abortion-ireland-poland.html

Ireland’s Struggle for Abortion Rights Should Be an Inspiration for the US

Ireland’s Struggle for Abortion Rights Should Be an Inspiration for the US

BY SINÉAD KENNEDY
Aug 22, 2022

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.

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.

Continued: https://jacobin.com/2022/08/ireland-abortion-rights-repeal-campaign-us-roe

The Irish Lesson

If the purpose of abortion bans is to actually reduce the rate at which women terminate pregnancies, the Irish experience shows how utterly ineffectual they are.

Fintan O’Toole
August 18, 2022 issue, NY Books (posted July 27)

In 1973, soon after the US Supreme Court established a right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, Charles E. Rice concluded that “the essential remedy to the abortion problem is a constitutional amendment.” Rice is an important figure in the intellectual history of the antiabortion movement that is now, with the recent overturning of Roe, enjoying its moment of triumph. He was a cofounder of the Conservative Party of New York State, formed by those who considered the Republican Party too liberal; one of his scholarly tracts is an attack on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As a professor of constitutional law, he established Notre Dame University in Indiana as a redoubt of the conservative Catholic legal thinking whose influence most fully blossomed when Donald Trump appointed Rice’s colleague and associate Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

Continued: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/08/18/the-irish-lesson-fintan-otoole/

Ireland – This woman died because of an abortion ban. Americans fear they could be next.

I think maternal mortality will go up,” said the expert who wrote Ireland's official report on the death of Dr. Savita Halappanavar, who was denied an abortion.

July 4, 2022
By Patrick Smith

After the Supreme Court’s historic decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, some doctors are highlighting the 2012 death of a pregnant woman in Ireland and warning that the same thing could happen on a large scale in the United States.

Dr. Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old Indian-born dentist, died in 2012 in Galway, on Ireland’s west coast, after she was denied an abortion by doctors who cited the country’s strict laws, despite there being no chance of her baby’s survival, according to Ireland’s official report on the case.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/woman-died-ireland-abortion-ban-warning-americans-roe-v-wade-rcna35431

Death and Suffering: The Story Behind Ireland’s Abortion Ban and its Reversal

The death of Savita Halappanavar in an Irish hospital in 2012 after she was denied an abortion during a miscarriage caused outrage across Ireland.

June 27, 2022
By Gretchen E. Ely

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion in the U.S., the nation may find itself on a path similar to that trodden by the Irish people from 1983 to 2018.

Abortion was first prohibited in Ireland through what was called the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861. That law became part of Irish law when Ireland gained independence from the U.K. in 1922. In the early 1980s, some anti-abortion Catholic activists noticed the liberalization of abortion laws in other Western democracies and worried the same might happen in Ireland.

Continued: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2022-06-27/the-story-behind-irelands-abortion-ban-and-its-reversal

27.06.2022

Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act

What Ireland’s Past Can Tell Us About A Post-Roe America

By Monica Potts
JUN. 8, 2022

Before 2018, most women in the Republic of Ireland were able to get abortions only if they traveled to a clinic in England or Wales or had a self-managed abortion at home, but figuring out how to do either of those options was difficult.

Information on abortion was censored in the first years of the ban, which took effect in 19831. Certain books were prohibited, and even the Irish edition of Cosmopolitan magazine had blank pages instead of adverts for British clinics. Meanwhile, those who sought abortions faced isolation, stigma and limited help from medical professionals. And for the few who were able to overcome those barriers and somehow reach one of the feminist networks that could help with information, logistics and fundraising, they still might pay hundreds of pounds or more for the procedure, transportation, meals and a hotel.

Continued: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-irelands-past-can-tell-us-about-a-post-roe-america/