Joyce Fegan: What happened to the revolution of Repeal?

Amelia Goonerage from Dublin joins campaigners celebrating in Dublin Castle after the yes vote won the 2018 referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment. Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

People took leave from work to campaign. There was an endless variety of badges and buttons. There were the T-shirts, tote bags, and jumpers. There was the mural. There was the covering up of the mural. There was a top-rating podcast created specifically to cover Repeal. 

There was the half a million euro raised in a handful of days through €2 donations for the posters. There were the groups — doctors, lawyers, psychologists, midwives, grandparents, parents, artists — all for choice. 

There was the spotlight of international media. There were documentaries. There was history in the making. There were stalls and marches, public meetings, and press conferences. There was the social media hate, the binary media debate.

And then there was the vote. After the exodus of more than 200,000 girls and women to Britain for abortion care since 1983, the night before the vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment on May 25, 2018, there was the spontaneous, unchoreographed influx of our wild geese at Dublin Airport voting with their feet.

Four years after the Irish electorate voted by 66.4% to remove the 35-year ban on abortion from our Constitution, what has happened to that uprising of energy that made it possible?

Did the toll of telling personal stories send people into silent and permanent retreat?

Did the delight of victory turn into disappointment as restrictions to abortion care materialised?

Did the emotional labour of overturning constitutionally-enshrined misogyny lead to burnout?

Repealers — how and where are they now, what happened to their fight?

A young woman leaves flowers at the Savita Halappanavar mural as the results in the  referendum on the 8th Amendment on the country's abortion laws takes place at Dublin Castle on May 26, 2018. Picture: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

Lourda Scott had three young children in 2018, the youngest of which was two, when she was out knocking on doors asking her neighbours to vote to repeal the amendment.

After months of campaigning, her exhaustion turned to relief when the vote came in. So did a feeling of buoyancy and a sense that the result was the “start of something new and positive”.

“For me it completely changed my life because I pivoted into politics,” says Lourda, now a local Green Party councillor in Wicklow.

“I switched my activism to politics. Repeal encouraged me,” she says.

How does she feel now, four years later?

“Dispirited and downhearted,” she says.

There’s a feeling we’ve come to a complete standstill in women’s healthcare, the men in power have stopped listening.

"There are a tonne of barriers to abortion healthcare, there’s a feeling the minister for health isn’t listening.

“The way the hospital (new National Maternity Hospital) was rushed through [Cabinet], the men in power saying we had two weeks, that’s not listening. The barriers have come down,” Lourda adds.

Her feeling about the way change occurs in the State is shared by lecturer and author Dr Mary McGill, who campaigned for Repeal in rural Ireland.

Emotional time

She describes the campaign and the aftermath as an “emotional time”.

“The toll the Eighth Amendment took on women should never be forgotten, nor should the work of generations of activists from across this island without whom it would still be in situ,” says the academic.

And how does she feel about the state of political play, when it comes to women now? As someone born into one of our mother and baby institutions she is especially disappointed.

“As a Millennial born in one of these institutions, I am tired of waiting for a proper recognition from the government of the harm done to children in this system, however long they spent in these ‘homes’," Mary says.

The disappointment of the mother and baby homes report was a reminder that while Ireland is capable of change, it never comes without a fight.

That sense of fight is something Dr Mary Favier has embodied since the 1980s, when she was in the lonely minority who campaigned against the insertion of the Eighth Amendment into the Constitution, in 2002 when she helped to set up Doctors for Choice and in the aftermath of the 2018 vote when she assisted in implementing the legislation into practice, GP practices specifically.

“From May 2018 to January 1, 2019, when we had a functional service — that was the hardest six months of my life,” says Dr Favier.

She was involved in convincing politicians, regulators and GPs to implement a community-provided abortion care service.

Amy Dunne, the woman at the centre of the controversial Miss D case in 2007,  outside the Dáil at an event organised by the National Women's Council of Ireland marking the fourth anniversary of Repeal the 8th referendum. Picture: Moya Nolan

Ireland remains the only country in the world with a GP-based abortion care national service.

But it’s far from perfect, and is described as patchy. While there is a GP in every county in Ireland that provides the service, only one in three practices provide the service, or said another way only one in nine GPs.

It gets patchier if you need abortion care from one of the 19 hospitals nationwide that provide maternity services. Only 11 of those hospitals currently provide abortion care. Women, including those with diagnoses of fatal foetal anomalies, are still travelling to Britain for care four years later.

Four years later, how does Dr Favier feel about the advancement of women’s healthcare post Repeal?

“I would still have significant concerns around how woman-centred healthcare is and the fact there are still issues around separation of church and State,” she says.

Someone who has also worked on the frontline of abortion care post Repeal, is Kitty Maguire.

She describes herself as being “absolutely burnt out” after the 2018 campaign and how it took her a “good year to come back to health” after it.

As a yoga teacher trainer and menstruality mentor she has been hosting pregnancy release circles in the intervening years.

“I held a pregnancy release circle online last night for people who’ve had an abortion, miscarriage, still birth or a traumatic pregnancy and every time I host these circles there are women from all over Ireland and other countries that have zoomed in for a kind therapeutic space to process and honour their experience,” says Kitty.

Sandy Connolly who also campaigned heavily for Repeal describes the very serious relief and the crying after the landslide vote, and how she was unable to speak for a week afterwards.

Relief to disappointment

That relief though has now turned to disappointment.

“I am really disappointed by the Government’s inaction around maternal healthcare, around perinatal healthcare, I think we get left behind, I think we get used as a soundbite,” says the community organiser and postpartum doula.

But she is not so disappointed that she is resigned to retreat:

The fight is still there. We are not going away, this continues.

As a man who campaigned, Ian McGahon used his learnings from the marriage equality campaign to lead in his community on Repeal. But four years later, he feels worried.

“The two referenda left me very hopeful for the future but I see right now the growth of extremist far-right ideologies that would happily row back on all of our hard fought for social justice wins. We can see in Ireland and many other countries a growing extremist hatred of women and minorities. It worries me,” he says.

This time four years ago change felt not only palpable, but really possible. Four years later, we see change comes dropping slow on Irish shores. Those who once felt buoyed then felt burnt out and some now even feel dispirited and disappointed.

While the arc of the moral universe is long, and we hope it bends toward justice, we now know that change is never permanent and rights are never guaranteed. Those who wish to bend it back rely on the exhaustion of those who fight for the rights of all.