New structures needed to tackle growing acceptability of abortion

IN March 1981, the Women’s Right to Choose movement organised a public meeting in Dublin’s Liberty Hall to push the case for legalised abortion in Ireland.

Activists from the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children heard about the meeting and bussed in supporters from all over the country.

The Right to Choose people were pleased at the large attendance. Change wouldn't be long coming, they felt. Journalist Mary Holland, one of organisers, addressed the gathering. To emphasise the struggle ahead, she read out an article from another well-known journalist of the era, Des Rushe, who was vehemently anti-abortion. "That," Holland said as she finished reading the article, "is what we are up against."

Her comment was greeted with rapturous applause. Then a woman stood up. "By the way, Mary, I'd like to clarify one thing. In case you thought that applause was for you, it wasn't. It was for Des Rushe." More applause.

"Oh, now I see how the land lies," said Holland good-humouredly. "We're very organised, aren't we?"

It's one of those stories which shows how heady, and sometimes unpleasant, abortion politics could be in the 1980s. But it illustrates two other points. One, the Pro-Life Amendment of 1983, the 20th anniversary of which occurs next Sunday, didn't happen in a vacuum. It was a response to a campaign to legalise abortion. Two, when it came to abortion activism, the pro-life movement always commanded more popular support than those in favour of abortion.

That second point still holds. Although the pro-life movement does not have the same number of activists as it had in 1983, it still has more people on the ground than its opposition, which is confined mainly to urban areas.

But that is not enough. The pro-life cause has suffered a number of setbacks in recent years. Last year's attempt to strengthen constitutional protection for the unborn was narrowly defeated. In 2001, Ireland's abortion rate was the highest on record, reaching 6,673, of which 939 were teenage abortions.

There is now widespread abortion referral in the country, thanks to Michael Noonan's abortion information legislation in 1995 which led, incidentally, to a further rise in Irish abortion rates.

The State and the health boards now see abortion as an appropriate response in cases where young girls say they are suicidally pregnant, despite medical evidence that abortion could compound their problems. The Government's Crisis Pregnancy Agency talks neutrally about "options'' and shows no inclination to discourage abortion as being bad for both women and their babies.

Despite the guarantee in our constitution to vindicate the life of the unborn, public opinion does not seem outraged.

Perhaps it is because people have become more ambivalent about right and wrong generally, and about abortion in particular. Church scandals and media bias are partly to blame. But in a celebrity-saturated culture, individualism has come into vogue. And abortion is the ultimate expression of the individualistic lifestyle.

Politically, the pro-choice movement managed to discredit the notion that constitutional protection for the unborn child was possible or desirable.

Campaigners against the 1983 amendment made great capital out of the fact that the amendment came to be interpreted by the Supreme Court as permitting abortion. Yet the widely-held view that the 1983 Pro-Life Amendment was counter-productive is largely the construct of certain journalists and politicians who would like this to be so.

For all its alleged flaws, the 1983 amendment is probably the main reason why abortion is not legal in Ireland today. Look at the evidence: Ireland did not follow a strong international trend by liberalising its abortion laws in the 1980s and 1990s. For a considerable period of time it achieved the near impossible by restricting the distribution of abortion referral information. As a result, our abortion rate, to judge from the number of Irishwomen going to England, remained low compared with other countries.

What's more, the Pro-Life Amendment became the basis for securing a protocol to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 that . This protocol still guarantees, for the moment at least, that the European Union cannot impose laws permitting abortion on Ireland.

By contrast, the claims made by those who opposed the Pro-Life Amendment turned out to be groundless. The then Taoiseach, Garret Fitzgerald, claimed: "If this amendment is passed, legal actions taken in our courts on the basis of its wording could preclude medical or surgical interventions necessary to save the life of the mother, which are at present carried out in all our hospitals."

The then Tánaiste, Dick Spring, remarked that "changes in medical practice would threaten the lives of hundreds of women".

The then Health Minister, Barry Desmond, said the amendment would cause 500 maternal deaths a year.

THESE claims never had any basis. After the passage of the 1983 amendment, Irish doctors continued to treat women in line with existing medical standards, even if that meant that, on occasions, the life of the unborn was lost in the process.

Maternal mortality went down after the amendment was passed, not up.

But if those who opposed the amendment were wrong about its alleged dangers, subsequent events proved the pro-life movement was too optimistic about what the 1983 amendment would achieve. Did pro-lifers lose sight of social and cultural transformation within Irish society in their attempt to secure legal protection for the unborn? Or did they consider that legal protection was the best that could be achieved in view of an inevitable collapse in public morality?

Either way, it is clear that, now, legal protection for the unborn should be just one part of organised opposition to abortion. Yes, there are voices calling for abortion in line with the X case and they should be opposed.

But the most important thing is to convince the people most directly involved, women, that abortion is bad for them as well as for their babies.

Ideally, the Government should be doing this discouraging abortion through legislation, advertising and education programmes, just as they are doing with smoking, speeding and drink-driving. There should be a pro-life division within the Department of Health, for example. And instead of discussing "options", the Crisis Pregnancy Agency should be convincing women not to have abortions.

But since the Government isn't doing it, pro-life people must. It's time for new structures to address the increased social and cultural acceptability of abortion.

Schools run by the Catholic Church and possibly by other Christian denominations should be places where young people are educated in a sensitive way about the injustice of abortion. The pro-life movement should also look at financial support for women at risk of abortion, an initiative the late Cardinal Thomas Winning pursued so successfully in Glasgow.

I don't know if the pro-life movement has the structures and the money to do all this. But can it afford not to?