Thank you, Leo, for prioritising women

Thank you, Leo Varadkar. Thank you for acknowledging that abortion has always existed in Ireland.

Thank you for talking about the sad, lonely, frightening, and unncescessary journeys made by thousands of Irish women every year, because we have treated abortion the same as every other Irish problem: pretending it doesn’t exist.

We are brilliant at that. We are world leaders at pretending things don’t exist. Ask the ghost of Ann Lovett.

We have always pretended abortion doesn’t exist in Ireland, even as, every day, women borrow money, take time off work, book flights, and travel to unfamiliar places, unknown hospitals, and wake up after anaesthetic to negotiate their way to the airport or coach station, pretending nothing has happened.

An Irish solution to an Irish problem.

Thank you, Leo Varadkar, for standing up for women. We are not used to Taoiseachs standing up for our reproductive rights.

Obviously, it’s the fearless, tireless campaigning women who have made this referendum happen, but these fearless, tireless women have been campaigning for years for our reproductive automony and you, Leo Varadkar, are the first Taoiseach to unequivocally offer support, to show humanity.

Thank you for speaking up, as a doctor, about the dangers to women’s health of taking medication unsupervised, alone, without back-up, to terminate early pregnancy; and about the mental health of women unsupported after a termination.

Imagine expecting men to go through even a fraction of that. There would be no Eighth Amendment. It would never, not for one second, have existed.

Ireland was built on the shame of women. Since the dawn of the Republic, we have been controlled by Church and State using false tropes — saints or sluts, mummies or murderers — while nothing is required of men beyond their judgement. Generations of internalised misogyny.

I am the same age as Ann Lovett. As long as I live, I will never forget the horror of it, because we were all potential Ann Lovetts back then.

All one fertilised ovum away from death in a field. So messed up was our relationship with sex that we institutionalised sadism and made it the norm.

So, thank, you Leo Varadkar. Thank you for being born in 1979, and for being from a different ethnic background, so that you don’t have a thousand generations of prime, Irish shame locked into your DNA.

Thank you for being pro-women.

How bitter it must feel for the family of Savita Halappanavar, who was killed by the Eighth Amendment, who was killed by an idea called ‘pro-life’.

The most succinct response to ‘pro-life’ comes from Joan Chittister, a Catholic nun: “I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life.

“In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born, but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed…..That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth.”