Anne Harris: Pro-choice activists are on a 35-year march of attrition

Irishwomen of a certain age have a unique social mirror: the kind normally afforded by something like a school re-union after decades, where the ageing process is reflected in the faces of your peers and societal change is measured in the urgency of the conversation. That looking glass is the seeming eternity of pro-choice marches.

“I haven’t seen you since the X case marches ?” The greeting to a friend on a Repeal the Eighth march some weeks ago, was warm. “How’s life?” Then followed the old soldiers’ litany of the travails of the ‘83 marches, the urgency of the X case marches, the sadness of the Savita marches.

It’s been a 35-year long march of attrition. It is hard to convey the febrile atmosphere of 1983, when Ireland was a more extremely Catholic state than it is today, where entities like SPUC (the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child) felt an entitlement to influence lawmakers and where pregnant women were truly incidental to the raging debates about the rights of the foetus.

Only months before a 15-year-old girl would die alone, giving birth in a Granard graveyard. The airways were dominated by men – lay and clerical – with passionate prejudices about control of the female fulcrum. And rural bachelors were as opinionated about fallopian tubes as they were about bicycle tyre tubes.

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Ironically, these past weeks, in which men have talked endlessly about cervices and vulvae, are an unwelcome reprise of those days.

Reminder

And then there’s government dilatoriness in the Repeal campaign – no posters at all – which is a reminder that Garret Fitzgerald campaigned against the amendment moved by his own government in 1983.

In that government there were several strong feminists, from the Womens Political Association feeder school. This had little impact on the discourse. At one feminist gathering, one of the feminist ministers delivered herself of the view that abortion was not an issue in Ireland. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know one woman who has had an abortion,” she said. A low muttering became audible and the words “You know me, minister,” gathered the grumble of several voices.

The truth is few women offered personal stories. Feelings ran too high back then. All the arguments were what we now call "the hard case" arguments: what would you do if your mother/daughter/sister/ was raped. In Image magazine in 1983, I told the story of an ordinary young woman who wasn't ready for motherhood and felt a termination, in her case, was an act of good motherhood. "She wasn't a girl from Sin City," went the blurb. "She was a girl from Cork city." The extreme polarisations in the blurb shows how transgressive and stigmatised abortion was at that time.

In 1982 the country was galvanised by the phone-tapping scandal and IRA hunger strikes, but from the moment the constitutional amendment was mooted by the then Fianna Fáil government, the gynaeco-social obsession of the Irish political class took over. And it has never been far below the surface since.

Incredibly, it was argued that the 1983 amendment gave increased rights to a woman, because abortion was permissible if her life was in danger. All that came unstuck in the X case of 1992, where a 14-year-old, by definition a rape victim, was denied the right to travel for abortion, even though she was considered a real suicide risk by her doctors. The Supreme Court however, decreed that she was entitled to have an abortion in Ireland on the grounds of the suicide risk.

The hugely emotive X case didn’t sway the stony hearts of SPUC, whose legal challenges to information on abortion had been opposed by most of the student unions in Ireland. Something was dislodging in the Chinese wall of Catholic influence. Its moral authority, corroded by revelations of clerical child sex abuse and cover up, was crumbling. And the referenda of 1992 and 2002, which sought to reverse the Supreme Court decision on suicide, were defeated.

Deaf ears

It’s now over five years since the death of Savita Halappanavar, the young woman, dying of septic miscarriage whose pleas for a termination fell on deaf ears, cried out for retribution in the form of change to our abortion laws.

So has anything changed since 1983? Quite a lot, in my view – though the disproportionate number of NO posters in Dublin says otherwise.

Pro-life proponents no longer root their arguments in Catholic absolutism: abortion is murder therefore – understandably – untenable. Many do not oppose the right to travel or to information on abortion. What they oppose is abortion in Ireland. Which makes you wonder about the Ireland they envisage and whether hypocrisy has replaced hysteria.

The pro-choice side of the debate is decidedly calmer this time round. The marriage equality referendum has focused minds. Hard cases are eschewed in favour of the core – a civil right claim over a choice no man will ever have to make. Few in pro-choice now deny that abortion doesn’t have consequences. But they want to take responsibility, to have it in Ireland, free of shame and secrecy.

The sheer longevity of the abortion march in Ireland has created a new speculum – a network or collective of marchers which pops up, like after the Belfast rape trial, where women feel righteous indignation.

I don’t think they’re going away, whatever the result next Friday.

Anne Harris is a journalist and commentator