Ireland won’t be an equal society until women can have abortions

I TUNED into BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, because it was about Ireland, and I still had that buoyant feeling from last week, says Suzanne Harrington.

‘Oh goody,’ I thought. More jolly, life-affirming, queertastic equality stuff. More about how, actually, these days, Ireland might be one of the most progressive places to live.

But it wasn’t about LGBT equality. It was about Irish women’s rights to what Irish journalist Una Mullally termed “bodily autonomy”. It was about how it is now easier to be a gay woman in Ireland than to be a woman who wants to be in charge of her own body. About how gay rights outstrip women’s rights. How the Irish state has successfully dealt with equality legislation, but won’t go near the legislation that would allow women to make their own medical decisions. It was about the ‘A’ word.

So, the Woman’s Hour presenter asked: if you are a pregnant 17-year-old girl, unready for a family, or a 47-year-old woman who doesn’t want any more family, what can you do in Ireland? The answer is a big fat nothing.

That’s why thousands of Irish women — the average is 12 a day — travel to the UK for a medical procedure that their own country refuses to provide.

Mullally says that the conservative right is terrified that marriage equality will relax our abortion laws. Meanwhile, the European Court of Human Rights deems these laws a breach of Irish women’s human rights. We have got our ‘eights’ in a mess: the Irish Eighth Amendment — a constitutional ban on abortion — contravenes the European Article 8 — the right to a private life.

We need to talk about this. Properly, rationally, without photos of aborted foetuses shoved in anyone’s face. Everyone is terrified of looking like a monster. Women who need to terminate pregnancies are not monsters. Women who need to terminate pregnancies are human beings, who, for a million complex reasons that are nobody else’s business, don’t want to bring more human beings into the world. We are more than just carriers, receptacles, incubators. Yet, in Ireland, this is all that we legally are. Just ask Savita Halappanavar’s widower.

So how can we move this forward without rosaries, vigils, and technicolour medical images on placards? Do we have to wait for another generation to evolve, before we can tackle it? Ireland is a new country, with some of the best equality legislation in the world, yet still views women with what Una Mullally calls “ingrained misogyny”.

The role of the Irish woman is still the mammy, whether she likes it or not, and the cellular growth of a potentially future human inside her body is legally regarded as equal to her. A foetus only has the potential to be a person — unlike a woman, who most definitely is. And yet we still make no distinction.

We need to talk about this.