There’s a big vote
happening in Ireland this week. We’re voting on whether or not to repeal the
eighth amendment. To those who don’t know, in 1983 the country voted to include
this amendment in the constitution, ‘equalling’ the life of the unborn to that of
the pregnant woman. Basically meaning that women can’t get abortions, in any
circumstances.
I’ve been talking to a
lot of people about this lately, as someone who lives in London I work with
people of many different nationalities, and not one of them had a clue about
the extent of what the eighth amendment is about. One person went ‘Oh I’m sure
if a grandmother heard her granddaughter had had a one night stand and had made
a mistake, she’d want her to have the choice’. I repeated this to a customer later
on and she said ‘Ireland doesn’t care about that. Ireland doesn’t care if a 12
year old gets raped by her father’
You’d think she was exaggerating
but no. In Ireland if you get raped you can’t get an abortion. If it’s incest
you can’t get an abortion. If the baby has a fatal foetal anomaly(FFA) you
can’t get an abortion. If you get cancer and find out you’re pregnant you can’t
get an abortion. The only instance of you being able to get an abortion is if
you will die otherwise. And this was only made law after a woman died.
In 2012 Savita
Halappanavar went to hospital suffering a miscarriage. Because the doctors
could still hear a heartbeat they refused to give her an abortion. Due to this
lack of care Savita developed sepsis and died. And only after the tragedy of
her death did it become law that you could get an abortion if you would die
otherwise.
There are countless
other stories, the X Case, A, B and C v Ireland, Sheila Hodgers and Ms Y. Let
alone the twelve women a day who travel to the UK to get an abortion. Or those
who buy abortion pills over the internet and can’t seek proper medical care to
deal with their situation.
Those women who don’t
think it’s the right time to have a child or who’s contraception didn’t work or
those who just don’t want a baby. The one’s who desperately wanted a child but
suffered a FFA and had to declare their baby as ‘human remains’ at customs just
so they could bury their baby at home.
Imagine the trauma.
The trauma of being raped or finding out your baby is dying inside of you.
Imagine having to book a flight and queue up with everyone else, travel away
from home, have medical treatment in another country, maybe not have your loved
ones with you or someone to hold your hand. To have to travel back home when
you should be resting and then not being able to tell anyone what you have been
through.
In Ireland currently
if you’re found to have illegally taken abortion pills you can face up to 14
years in prison. 14 YEARS. For having control over your own body.
If you die, doctors
can’t donor your organs without consent. A dead person currently has more
rights to their own body than a woman in Ireland.
And it’s disgraceful
that we’re even having to vote on this. That the No side is shoving posters up
full of such vitriol and lies. Women should have control over their own bodies,
they should be able to make up their own minds about what happens in their
lives. Not be forced to carry a pregnancy they don’t want or fly to a different
country to receive the healthcare they should get at home.
Talking to people in
London, they can’t fathom it, they can’t believe that this is happening in 2018
in a country just over the water. And it’s ridiculous that this is what we’ve
been brought up with, what we’ve been taught. That we should be ashamed of
having an abortion, even of having sex at all.
So much of this is
still shrouded in the Catholic church. The same church where mass graves of
babies and children were found in a home for unwed mothers, who had the Magdalene
Laundries, who threw babies into septic tanks, who sold the babies of those
unwed to Americans, who forced mothers to give their babies up for adoption.
The Catholic Church
only seems to care about babies when they’re still in-utero, when it’s ‘a sin’
to kill the unborn, when it’s evil to ‘slaughter the innocents’. The Church
should have nothing to do with this, they should have nothing to do with
anyone’s health or life decisions. Divorce was illegal, being gay was illegal,
the pill was illegal. Sex should be had in marriage, with two straight people
and oh no don’t use contraception because children are a gift of god but only
in these exact circumstances. It’s shame, nothing but shame, for sex, for basic
enjoyment, for being a fucking human. According to them we should be punished
for being human.
Abortions happen
anyway. They happen in Ireland and they happen when Ireland exports an issue
they don’t want to deal with to other close by countries. Voting yes isn’t
agreeing with abortion. It’s agreeing with choice, it’s agreeing that women
should have the right to their own body, to decide what is best for them and to
be able to access the healthcare they need when they need it. People who don’t
agree with abortion shouldn’t have one but it shouldn’t be up to anybody else
to decide what a person does with their own body. Vote yes, to stop the shame,
to be compassionate, to help women who should have had the decision to choice a
long time ago. It’s a once in a lifetime vote and we can’t let this slip us by,
vote yes on May 25th, repeal the 8th while we can.
