Never again let shame be used as a weapon

It’s a bit embarrassing, really, when you think about it. Usually when Amnesty International get involved, the human rights violations are in places we dismiss as far, far away. Poor, troubled, undeveloped places, or countries in the grip of some megalomaniac tyrant. Places you wouldn’t want to go on your holiday.

But now Amnesty International are not just on our doorstep, but inside our house, and suggesting we need some serious deep cleaning to get rid of the harmful and dangerous laws that affect Irish women. That we are violating the human rights of half of our citizens, and have been doing so for a very long time.

We have long known that our abortion law endangers the health, well-being and lives of women, failing as it does to differentiate between the life of an adult woman and the existence of an embryo.

Health and well-being is endangered and compromised every time one of the daily twelve of us takes a flight to the for a termination, a process which is traumatic, unpleasant – not to mention expensive – and entirely avoidable. In terms of endangering the lives of women, it is arguable that the Irish state’s anachronistic, cowardly and muddled approach to abortion directly caused the death of Salvita Halappanavar.

For the longest time, no government has had the guts to take on the screamy campaigners who brandish placards depicting aborted embryos. Instead, Irish women do what they have always done in the face of abusive situations – they put up and shut up, and book a flight to. Before cheap flights, they booked the boat. Before the boat, they were at the mercy of places like Bessborough.

This has all gone on decades too long. There should have been a major change after the death of Salvita. There wasn’t. But now thanks to Amnesty International’s research, it turns out that not only are the majority of Irish people not homophobic, but that we are also quite keen to have our abortion law changed. You know, so that a woman is regarded as more important than a pea-sized cell-cluster. That a woman can be jailed for upto 14 years for electing to terminate an unwanted pregnancy sounds like something you might read about in countries where we deploy UN peacekeepers, or at the very least, a dystopian Margaret Atwood novel. That women are never prosecuted is entirely irrelevant – the very existence of this law shows the world just exactly how we regard our women citizens. Not. Very. Highly.

Such human rights violations over the body autonomy of half of our citizens is utterly out of sync with the progressive, compassionate country has become. Supporting gay and trans rights is easy – it makes straight people feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and everyone’s a winner. You would think that supporting the rights of women to own our own bodies would be a no-brainer, but it’s not. Yet. Meanwhile, we need courage, determination, and the absolute refusal to ever again allow shame to be used as a weapon against us. Ever, ever, again.