It’s over. Women in Ireland will no longer have to feel we are being pursued throughout the country by giant foetuses and born babies alike accusing us of murderous intent towards them, the fruit of our wombs. Those outrageous and woman-hating posters will be gone from our lampposts and telegraph poles and from billboards in bogs, villages and cities.
I drove from Derry to Sligo last week and from the Border onwards, found myself passing through a menacing forest of them, the grass verges along the roadside beneath them planted with thousands of white crosses. There was another poster, too. This had the 1916 Proclamation and photographs of some of its signatories. “They told us to cherish all the children of the nation equally – vote No,” it instructed.
The message was stark – we were being told that it is just not Irish to believe that a woman, or indeed an ovulating girl child, needs and has a right to have control over her own body, and its fertility. As novelist Sally Rooney wrote in an essay in the London Review of Books, the sub-text is: “No matter what’s going on in a woman’s life, it’s always a good time to have a baby.”
Rooney also drew attention to the fact that anti-abortionists even protested with posters of dismembered foetuses outside maternity hospitals. In recent days, people in a Dublin children’s hospital reported that loud anti-abortion messages were being relayed in the street outside.
‘Historians for Repeal’
Historian Mary McAuliffe, rebelling against the appropriation of revolutionary Irishness, took to wearing a large badge with Constance Markievicz on it and the caption “Historians for Repeal.” She pointed out that what the 1916 leaders meant was that all of the people, including the Protestants in the North, were to be cherished equally. But in Leitrim a prominent “No” campaigner told me that the feminism that Markievicz had in mind when she put on her military uniform and fought had nothing to do with women having the right to kill.
Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald was one of the most persuasive contributors to the repeal side. The party has modernised. When, in 1983, bishop Joseph Cassidy (to whom Garrett FitzGerald’s government gave the right to access the attorney general’s advice on the proposed amendment ) was claiming that the most dangerous place for a baby to be was in its mother’s womb, Sinn Féin was on his side.
In 1985 feminists managed to get a motion on a woman’s right to choose abortion through the party’s ardfheis. The following year there was a plethora of anti-choice motions from cumanns the length and breadth of the country. A fierce debate resulted in the old policy of opposition to abortion being reinstated. One woman denounced the pro-choice feminists with the unforgettable cry of: “Youse are murdering future republicans.”
At a meeting held by anti-repeal activists I heard Bernadette Smyth of Precious Life claim there were English hospitals which were heated by the burning bodies of Irish babies
There are those who lament the change. The Belfast Newsletter reported that after Sinn Féin voted to liberalise its stance last year, the president of County Tyrone's Ancient Order of Hibernians, former IRA man Gerry McGeough, presented members with a charter against abortion. One of the messages on Tyrone AOH's Facebook page, signed "Faith and Fatherland", claimed Sinn Féin had promised and failed to deliver a United Ireland, turning instead to peddling "abortion to kill off our future generations".
‘Republican objectives’
Anti-choice campaigner Bernadette Smyth of Precious Life, said supporters of Sinn Féin’s “republican objectives” were disgusted. At a meeting held by anti-repeal activists in Sligo earlier this year, I heard Smyth claim that there were English hospitals which were heated by the burning bodies of Irish babies.
A bid was also made to secure the Irish language for the “No” side. One pro-repeal campaigner was tackled by someone who said she was demeaning the national language by wearing a “Votail Tá” badge. The woman responded in Irish, but her antagonist did not understand what she was saying.
Sligo man Martin Forde told me last week that repealing the Eighth Amendment would have the same impact as the Famine. “The place will be depopulated,” he said. “The native Irish will become a minority . . . strangers in our own land.” Worse still, Muslims would be brought in, and you didn’t see them “voting for babies”, he warned.
I spoke with Forde at a debate during which dire warning were issued about the dangers of trusting politicians. Minister Simon Harris nicely dealt with this nonsense when he said Ireland’s current reliance on the more liberal abortion laws of England meant that we are putting our trust in those elected to the British parliament instead of our own Dáil Éireann.
It is over. Whatever happens, women in Ireland, whether they are Irish or from one of the many other countries now represented in our multicultural society, will continue to nurture babies in their wombs, to have babies and to love and care for them as they always have done.
Some of them will also choose to have an abortion when they face a pregnancy crisis. England has not been our enemy in this. It has cared for those banished from Ireland. I was moved to see so many of our emigrant young returning from Britain and farther afield to vote for Ireland to become a country in which it is safe to be a woman.