Ireland needs to maturely face up to its shortcomings on abortion

THE VENUE was laden with symbolism. Amnesty International was launching its report into the affects of Ireland’s draconian abortion laws and it was taking place in the Pillar Room in the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, writes Alison O’Connor.

On the other side of the building you knew there were wards full of women, some pregnant, some in the actual act of giving birth, others recovering as they lay admiring their newborn baby.

Coincidentally just as the speeches were about to begin, up popped a tweet from Mara Clarke of the UK-based Abortion Support Network (ASN). She was expressing delight that her tiny charity — which offers information, funding, and accommodation for Irish women forced to travel for an abortion — had been chosen as one of five fundraising causes by the popular British website Mumsnet.

So just as Amnesty was attempting to put an international spotlight on how Ireland’s abortion law treats women like criminals the Mumsnetters, as they are known, chose ASN as part of their JustGiving campaign. The website matches funds donated up to Stg£25,000.

After all, on Tuesday, the day of the launch, around 12 Irish women will have made their way to airports to catch flights to the UK, as Irish women do every day, and every year, so they can access an abortion.

At the top table there was a master of a maternity hospital, except it wasn’t the Rotunda’s, rather it was the Master of the National Maternity Hospital Dr Rhona Mahony. It was a real surprise to see her there. Simply attending and adding legitimacy to this important report was gutsy, but she went further and took to the podium and said that somewhere in the midst of personal opinion is the need to ensure that women in Ireland “have access to sound clinical care”.

She said that in Ireland the manner in which a woman may qualify for a termination of pregnancy is “cumbersome and complicated” and despite the fact that it relies on clinical judgement delivered in good faith to save a woman’s life, it is framed in a criminal context. If a doctor makes an error, she pointed out, that is potentially punishable by a custodial sentence of 14 years for both the mother and her clinician.

“What is a substantial risk to life? Is it 10-, 50-, or 80-per cent risk of dying? This is medical roulette. And what of a woman’s view of the risk presented to her. She must also be part of the negotiation to protect her life.”

Like so many of us Dr Mahony said she would never forget the High Court judgement which dominated last Christmas when somatic function was maintained in a dead woman so that her foetus could be incubated in what she said could only be described “as a macabre experiment”.

“This occurred against a backdrop where the overwhelming clinical judgement attested this foetus would not survive. A futile exercise the High Court said, but it could happen again.”

Alongside Dr Mahony was Gaye Edwards who is a mother of 4 children living in Co Wicklow. During her first pregnancy she had to travel to the UK for a termination after she received a diagnosis of fatal foetal impairment. She too was gutsy, in a really heart breaking way. Gaye and her husband Gerry have been through a horrific experience where they were utterly abandoned by the State at a time of most need. Now they feel forced to repeat their tragic story in public in an effort to get our politicians to take some action.

It had almost fallen out of fashion, if that is the phrase, to feature the stories of Irish women who travelled to terminate their pregnancies. The stories had become rare in the media, and the cases where a woman would be willing to identify herself almost, understandably, never occuring.

But as we saw from the same sex marriage referendum it was the telling of personal stories and the manner in which people could identify with those that caused the emotional connection which brought many around to a yes vote.

The report ‘She is not a criminal: The Impact of Ireland’s abortion law’ does the same in a way that is impossible to read without feeling sad and enraged at the same time.

For instance it told the story of Lupe, a Spanish woman living in Ireland who carried a foetus with no heartbeat for 14 weeks. She was treated in the same Galway hospital as Savita Halappanavar, for a similar situation.

“During that time I was feeling really scared since it had become clear to me that, if any complication raised, these people would let me die, just as they did with Savita,” explained Lupe who eventually left Ireland to receive emergency treatment in Spain.

The women spoken to consistently emphasised that having to travel abroad for an abortion made them feel like a criminal and many said they hoped for access to lawful abortion in Ireland in their lifetime.

Alison Begas of the Dublin Well Woman Centre spoke of a woman who came to their clinic around seven years ago following a termination in the UK. She began to haemorrhage in the clinic and they called an ambulance. “As she was being carried out of our clinic, her abiding concern was ‘please don’t report me to the Gardai, don’t report me’.”

Christina Zampas, a human rights lawyer and senior legal advisor to Amnesty is clearly a well-travelled woman but she began her address by saying that the situation in Ireland relating to abortion laws “is one of the worst I’ve seen in terms of a deliberate denial of care”.

Our recent legal reforms in this area have left Ireland’s legal framework largely unchanged. The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013 criminalises abortion on all but one ground. A woman may only obtain a legal abortion in Ireland if her life is at risk, including through suicide. The situation, said Ms Zampas, where a woman may have to be examined by up to seven doctors “I don’t know of anywhere else in the world actually,” she said.

Amnesty is calling on the Irish authorities to repeal Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution to “enable the provision of a human rights-compliant framework for abortion and information in law and practice”.

They want abortion decriminalised and replaced with a legal framework that ensures access to abortion in law, and in practice, at a minimum, in cases where the pregnancy poses a risk to the life or the physical or mental health of a pregnant woman or girl; in cases of severe and fatal foetal impairment; and in cases where the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.

It is very difficult now to imagine a scenario where our political parties will be able to put together their individual general election manifestos without addressing the issue of abortion, and just where they stand on the repeal of the Eight Amendment.

This Amnesty report will certainly provide them with an excellent starting point. I may be misjudging it but it does feel as if something is changing in this bleak debate and we may finally face up maturely to this problem.

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