As the campaign for legal abortion gained momentum, a few courageous voices were raised against it. “Babies are not like bad teeth to be jerked out just because they cause suffering,” said one MP, who added that she feared the legalisation would lead to “abortion on demand”.
The year was 1967, and the politician was Jill Knight, the Tory MP for Edgbaston, protesting against David Steel’s abortion bill. Her objection – that the phrasing of the law, however cautious, would lead to widespread abortion – has been vindicated.
Fifty years on, as Ireland debates the liberalisation of abortion, the parallels are hard to resist. For instance, the emphasis on special cases: as Britain talked about risks to medical and mental health, Irish abortion campaigners concentrate on pregnancies resulting from rape, or those where the unborn child suffers from a life-threatening illness.
No less a figure than David Steel has said that focussing on unusual cases is generally delusional. “It would seem the mistake being made in Ireland is to try to define the circumstances in which each abortion may be carried out, and that is a hopeless road to travel down,” he has said. “I never envisaged there would so many abortions.”
Of course, Ireland’s situation has many distinctive features. The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, added in 1983, affirms the “right to life”of the unborn child. That prohibition was weakened by a 2013 law which permits abortion where a woman’s life is at risk.
Now the “Repeal the 8th” campaign is hoping to make that amendment history. But constitutional change in Ireland needs a referendum, so pro-choice campaigners have several obstacles in their way.
Nevertheless, last week they scored a small victory. The Citizens’ Assembly, a forum of 99 randomly selected citizens who advise the government on policy, gave its support to relaxing the laws against abortion. Asked whether they would support legal abortion, 52 said yes, and 29 no. True, those 52 voters were divided about time restrictions. But pro-abortion campaigners said it was, in the words of one, a “huge vote for change”.
But the Citizens’ Assembly was criticised by pro-life activists. Cora Sherlock, of the Pro Life Campaign, asks why the Assembly heard testimony from BPAS, Britain’s largest abortion provider, and not from pro-life groups.
Sherlock hopes that the government’s response will note the “one-sided and chaotic manner” in which the Assembly conducted its deliberations. She attended the weekend on which it voted, and says the discussion was fairly shallow: there was no discussion, for instance, of the status of the unborn child, or its stages of development throughout pregnancy.
But Sherlock says Ireland’s debate has always suffered from a “spiral of silence”, in which certain perspectives are ruled out of political and media discussion. “The experiences of women who say they regret their abortions are ignored; the families who contemplated abortion, only to change their minds, and express gratitude for the fact that the Eighth Amendment was there to protect their child, are shut out of the debate,” she says.
Anti-Catholicism is on the rise, too. The Iona Institute’s David Quinn wrote recently in the Irish Catholic that “Church-bashing is the new Brit-bashing”. Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach, has frequently criticised the Church.
But Kenny is also sceptical about the idea of a referendum. “If you are going to take this out of the Constitution,” he has asked, “what are you going to replace it with?”
That is a question which pro-abortion campaigners struggle to answer. The public is ambivalent: an Irish Times poll suggests that three quarters support abortion in cases of rape, or where the child has a life-threatening illness; but only 28 per cent support abortion when “a woman believes she would be unable to cope because of her age or circumstances”, with 50 per cent opposing. Pro-lifers argue that any “special cases” amendment to the law will lead to abortion on demand.
In this context, the Pope’s visit to Ireland in August 2018 could be a dramatic political occasion. In America, the Pope confined himself to urging the defence of “human life at every stage of its development”. If he went further in Ireland, it would be a much-needed boost to Irish pro-lifers. As David Steel has reminded us, once abortion gains a legal foothold, it is very difficult to hold back.
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