The 8th: Toxic shame continues to haunt women years after Tuam horrors

As a woman listening, it was so wounding to realise what little value your country has in you, writes Alison O’Connor.

The absurdity of being a female in today’s Ireland struck forcibly while I sat listening to the Citizens’ Assembly last Saturday morning. This personal moment occurred just prior to the Assembly hearing the harrowing testimony of six Irish women with firsthand experience of the eighth amendment.

A legal expert was speaking about the Constitutional protection we provide to the unborn. Needless to say, it was a further torment for the poor Assembly members expected to make some sense of the legal quagmire which surrounds this issue and about which, as they now know so well, there is no certainty.

This is not to cast any aspersions on the speaker, barrister John O’Dowd. He made a very good, if somewhat lengthy presentation, of the situation as it exists. He spoke about eggs, and fertilised ova, implantation and IVF, and, crucially, when life might begin.

As many of the previous speakers who have addressed the Assembly have done, he went into the implications of the 2009 Roche v Roche judgment which involved a couple who had undergone IVF.

As part of the judgment, the Supreme Court found that the embryo at pre-implantation stage could not be regarded as having the rights of a child.

It was a struggle to keep up because experience has told those of us who follow the Assembly that examination of the legal implications of the eighth amendment is truly tortuous.

But my own ears certainly pricked up when I realised, listening to Mr O’Dowd, that I myself could be acting in a permanent state of illegality. Bear with me on this.

Showing a photograph of both on a screen behind him, Mr O’Dowd raised the prospect of how the legality of the morning-after pill (MAP) and intrauterine devices (IUD) for Irish women could be in doubt. For those of you who don’t know, the IUD is a small T-shaped device inserted into a woman’s uterus to prevent pregnancy.

They are a form of long-acting reversible birth control, used, I’d guess, by thousands of Irish women. Also available are hormone-releasing IUDs. These don’t just prevent pregnancy, but also treat serious menstrual complications which in some cases could otherwise end up in a hysterectomy.

Some women will opt for an IUD purely to ease crippling menstrual symptoms.

Looking up at the photograph of the IUD on the screen, and thinking of the one that I have been sporting for a number of years now, I honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the utterly Irish crackedness of it all.

In the weird and wonderful world that is the law around all things reproductive in Ireland it all, of course, comes down to when you think the unborn begins to exist.

Mr O’Dowd explained that since an IUD operates to prevent the implantation of the “developing entity” into the wall of the womb, then that could constitute the destruction of the life of the unborn, and be contrary to the right to life of the unborn.

Now, for tedious reasons that I’m not going to get into here (watch Mr O’Dowd back if you like, all the presentations can be found on citizensassembly.ie) the morning-after pill, only available to women in Ireland since 2003, would be considered a far bigger sin than the IUD.

Lest we forget, women have only been able to walk into a pharmacy and ask for one of those without a prescription since 2011.

He reminded us that when all the furore was going on concerning the freer availability of the emergency pill, a group did announce that they were going to take a judicial review in the High Court, but that never went ahead. As a result, in legal terms, “we don’t have any decision on this question”.

Yes, yes, lawyers will differ on the issue, and the strong likelihood is that those of us brazenly having IUDs inserted, or indeed taking the MAP, will not be thrown into prison — but the fact is there is no certainty. The second fact is that it is all, at its most basic, nastily anti-female.

Last weekend’s Citizens’ Assembly was held in the shadow of the gruesome revelations of the previous day that “a significant number” of children’s remains had been found at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam.

These women who fell pregnant all those decades ago were banished by their families and society to these homes, where they were treated savagely and forced to give up their babies for adoption. As we know from Tuam, infant mortality rates were extraordinarily high and up to 800 babies died there.

It’s true that no such practices take place anymore — but how far has Holy Catholic Ireland really travelled when you can’t even say with certainty that the insertion of a contraceptive device, which can also have significant medical benefits, could mark you out as a citizen acting against the law?

Later last Saturday, as the Assembly members sat and listened to the audio recordings of women speaking about their experiences of crisis pregnancies, it was almost possible to hear the proverbial pin drop. It was heart-breaking.

As a woman listening, it was so wounding to realise what little value your country has in you; that this is the sort of suffering that Irish females are still forced to endure as a result of the eighth amendment.

Then, on Tuesday, Taoiseach Enda Kenny stood up in the Dáil and made a strong statement about the Tuam revelations, saying they were a cause of shock and shame across the country. He condemned the treatment of single mothers, who broke societal rules on sexual behaviour, and the treatment of their children.

“Women of that era had an amazing capacity to self-impregnate,” he said with irony, referencing the widespread hypocrisy in Ireland at that time. “We buried our compassion, humanity, and mercy.”

Certainly, having listened just four days previously to those women who told their stories at the Assembly, the way they felt unsupported, abandoned, afraid, forced to travel for an abortion as a result of the circumstances surrounding their pregnancies, the irony of the Taoiseach’s statement was all too obvious. What about today’s hypocrisy, mercy, or lack of compassion, Taoiseach?

Possibly the most distressing thing to listen to was the toxic shame that ran through all the women’s narratives. The Taoiseach referred to the shame at an unplanned pregnancy that saw you thrown into a mother and baby home previously.

In 2017, there is the awful shame that exists for a woman forced to travel abroad, often alone, if she wishes to terminate that pregnancy which, for all the change that supposedly exists in attitudes, she might as well still have “self-impregnanted”.

These are the thousands of women that our State and society are failing. At its most basic level the Taoiseach is a man who has been in charge of a country for years where even using a responsible and safe method of contraception such as an IUD, to prevent pregnancy, is possibly illegal.

It was International Women’s Day on Wednesday and, given the week that was in it, Irish women didn’t have much cause for celebration.

As a woman listening, it was so wounding to realise what little value your country has in you