Strange, isn’t it, how often this pattern repeats? We are assured in stentorian tones that not only is something never going to happen, but it is scaremongering and manipulative even to suggest that it will. Then we are told that it has happened, and furthermore, it is unequivocally a good thing.
Before the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, we were assured that all that would happen was that a similar number to the 2,879 women who travelled to England and Wales in 2018 would no longer have to do so.
Then-tánaiste Simon Coveney believed the argument, though he said “removing the equal right to life of the unborn from our Constitution [was] not something I easily or immediately supported”. In an oped, he said any woman choosing abortion after a three-day waiting period and other safeguards “is very likely to have travelled to the UK or accessed a pill online in the absence of such a system being available in Ireland”. He and other reluctant repealers were promised that numbers of abortions would not rise rapidly and inexorably.
The latest abortion figures show 10,852 abortions in Ireland in 2024. There were 54,062 live births in 2024. For every five babies born alive, one was aborted.
READ MORE
Is there no number of abortions that would be unacceptable? If one in two pregnancies was ending in abortion, would that be too many?
UK Department of Health figures show the number of women giving Irish addresses for abortions halved between 2001 and 2018, with a 5 per cent drop from 2017.
Numbers were dropping before Repeal, in other words.
Even allowing for the tiny number in 2018 of Irish-based women having abortions in the Netherlands and those using illegal abortion pills, the rise in numbers of abortions is shocking. Some 55,000 of them have taken place in Ireland since Repeal.
The reality is that restrictions on abortion reduce abortion numbers. US advocacy group Secular Pro-life has a useful summary of the evidence.
Many studies claiming restrictive abortion laws don’t lower rates overlook socio-economic factors. Most countries with strict laws have low economic development, and poorer nations tend to have higher abortion rates. This important confounding factor is often ignored.
As a relatively wealthy liberal democracy that banned abortion, our abortion rates were much lower.
Abortion numbers can triple, and still Ireland refuses to acknowledge that the reluctant repealers were wrong, wrong, wrong. The Eighth was saving lives in the thousands.
We collect statistics on where abortions happen in Ireland and under what part of the legislation, and virtually nothing else. We seem to have zero interest in the reasons why women have abortions – whether it is poverty, lack of support, or housing.
Is that because we don’t want to look too closely at anything that might undermine the idea that abortion is just another healthcare procedure?
At some level, people know well that abortion is unlike any healthcare procedure. English singer Lily Allen recently sang a flippant parody of My Way about not knowing exactly how many abortions she had. It was probably five. Many pro-choice people were shocked.
The comments on the BBC video of the podcast she hosts with Miquita Oliver, who has also had “about five” abortions, showed the conflict people felt.
Some pro-choice people felt that by saying the only justification needed for abortion is “I don’t want a f**king baby”, she had handed ammunition to the anti-abortion advocates.
Others disagreed, with comments such as: “It’s important to support any abortions for any reason. If you start putting restrictions on who can have them, how many they’re allowed, and how they must act when they’ve had them ... well, you’re not pro-choice.”
I am not interested in dumping on Allen or Oliver. Allen has spoken about losing her virginity at 12, about a 19-year-old friend of her father’s who bought her drinks and “had sex with me” when she was 14, and about living through her teens to her 30s in a haze of drugs, alcohol and mental ill-health.
(By the way, we have no idea how many women are coerced into abortion, even though domestic violence campaigners tell us it happens in Ireland, including one under 18-year-old who was locked in a room and forced to take abortion pills.)
Allen and Oliver are not alone in joking about abortion. Irish comedian Katie Boyle has a comedy show about her experience of having an abortion aged 34 in the US, which caused the presenters of the Morning Show on Ireland AM to laugh. Nonetheless, most people still react with shock when abortion is treated as contraception – or a joke.
It reminds me of debating in the past with people who were adamantly pro-choice, who visibly flinched when the number of babies with Down syndrome who are aborted was mentioned. Their humanitarian, pro-disability rights instincts conflicted with their other deeply held beliefs about the right to choose to end early human lives.
The problem is that while bans and restrictions on abortion did decrease rates, those of us who consider ourselves pro-life depended on the legal ban while underestimating how the culture was changing.
To keep abortion figures low in a well-off democracy, we needed to persuade people to build a woman-friendly society where pitting women’s rights against the next generation’s right to life became an unthinkable and completely outdated dilemma. The failure to do so really is no laughing matter.
